Demagogic leftists have wasted no time in pouncing on the horrific massacre in Florida to demonize conservatives while offering not one single solution that would have prevented the violence. Lefties insist we need to ban gun; conservatives say we need to lock up lunatics. We will analyze the nuts and bolts of the gun control debate point by hollow point. Then, our youth culture correspondent Andy Millennial joins the show to give a young person’s perspective on the violence, policy proposals, and the future of conservatism broadly. Finally, the Mailbag!
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Demagogic leftists have wasted no time in pouncing on the horrific massacre in Florida to demonize conservatives while offering not one single solution that would have prevented the violence.
Lefties insist we need to ban guns.
Conservatives say we need to lock up lunatics.
We will analyze the nuts and bolts of the gun control debate point by hollow point.
Then, our youth culture correspondent, Andy Millennial, joins the show to give a young person's perspective on the violence, policy proposals, and the future of conservatism broadly.
Finally, The Mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The demagogic left is especially awful on these issues.
People have read the facts of the case.
I think Ben was talking about the facts of this awful shooting earlier today.
I'll talk a little bit more about the reaction.
Former Congressman Joe Walsh pointed out that a semi-automatic weapon means one pull of the trigger and one bullet comes out.
That's what a semi-auto is.
Nobody knows what these means because there are all these euphemisms flying around.
Assault weapons, which was a term that was just invented to demagogue and compare regular semi-automatic rifles, which have been around for a very long time, to assault rifles where it's an automatic weapon.
So he pointed out that he's not just firing a machine gun.
It's one trigger pull, one bullet comes out.
Some dummy on Twitter responds.
He says, defending an AR-15 while 17 children lay dead, you're part of the problem, sir.
And this is the really awful thing about this, because we are accused, if we look at this awful shooting, the left would like to pretend that gun rights people, people who support the Second Amendment, are thrilled at these shootings.
We say, oh, this is, oh, how wonderful.
Oh, tee-hee-hee, lovey-dovey-dovey.
But of course that isn't the case.
And to accuse us of not taking this seriously, they are projecting, because it is exactly the left that does not take this seriously.
They say there's this awful problem.
We say, right, here are the facts of the problem.
How can we fix it?
And they say, how dare you talk about the facts?
How dare you observe the reality of these guns and the reality of these gun control laws?
You're a heartless, you're a monster, you're part of the problem.
They are the problem.
The left is a huge part of the problem in this issue because they won't have a serious conversation about the actual mechanics of gun control, of firearms, of mental health in the country.
They're the ones stopping that conversation by shouting down anybody who's willing to point out simple facts, such as a semi-automatic rifle is a rifle where you pull the trigger once and one bullet comes out.
So the FBI and the local authorities clearly failed to stop this threat, despite knowing about it.
That is all irrelevant to CNN, though.
We know that government bureaucracies are never going to get better at these sorts of things, so we can't rely on that.
The government was supposed to enforce some threats that they got.
They were aware of this.
There were laws on the books that they probably could have used, and they just didn't do it.
But that's the nature of bureaucracies.
We will get to some gun control numbers in a second.
Here is CNN. CNN, which was there on the scene to demagogue the situation.
Do you have a message for the lawmakers?
Do you have a message for Congress, for the president?
My message to lawmakers in Congress is please take action.
Ideas are great.
Ideas are wonderful and they help you get reelected and everything.
But what's more important is actual action and pertinent action that results in saving thousands of children's lives.
Please take action.
Do you have a sense of what kind of action that would be?
Any action at this point, instead of just complete stagnancy and blaming the other side of the political aisle, would be a step in the right direction.
And working together to save these children's lives is what this country needs.
So that is David Hogg.
He survived the shooting, and I'm not criticizing him for this statement.
He's some shaken-up 18-year-old, presumably, who just saw people get shot.
So I'm not criticizing him for this statement.
I will point out, what he said means absolutely nothing, right?
He said that we need action.
And CNN was waiting for him to say, please, what kind of action?
Assault weapons ban, this ban, that ban, that ban.
But he didn't even go that far.
He said, we just need some action.
But then he said, ideas are good, but really we need action.
And he was just saying words that sort of sounded like they mean something, but obviously they don't.
I'm criticizing CNN because they went down there and they put this kid on television and they want to make a big splash out of it.
You know, these...
Cute little kids who are saying we need to do this and it's this awful, awful event and they want to tug on our heartstrings to make us pass more laws to take away guns from lawful gun owners even though none of those laws would do a thing to prevent shootings like this.
The Media Research Center reviewed the big networks, ABC, CBS, NBC. They reviewed their gun coverage from 2012 to 2013.
They found 216 stories on guns.
It skewed 8 to 1 to advocate Barack Obama's gun control policies.
At that time, Barack Obama was pushing a slew of gun control legislation.
8 to 1, they favored his legislation.
Gun control advocates appeared 26 times compared to just 7 times for constitutional activists and Second Amendment advocates.
CBS, the network of Cronkite and Rather, ran anti-gun stories at a rate of 22 to 1.
22 to 1.
Not just the way it is.
Those are just the facts at CBS. And it wasn't just the big networks.
Here is a typical example of CNN's coverage of the Second Amendment.
Not everyone in Colorado wants more guns in the hands of its own people.
State Representative Rhonda Fields is one of them.
This is a quote coming from an employee at a gun shop.
He said, a lot of people are saying, I didn't think I needed a gun, but now I do.
Representative Fields, if this person was sitting right there next to you, what would you tell him?
I have to challenge you.
Why hasn't your party, the Democratic Party, done more to legislate guns?
Because as you know, that assault weapons ban expired in 2004.
Wow, really hard-hitting, really powerful questions, really putting truth to power, because CNN just exists to tee up these little softballs for Democrats to make their points that are basically irrelevant to the debate.
Let's go through the nuts and bolts of what can be done about gun control and trying to stop these shootings.
Let's start with the bolts, the facts that pertain to the guns themselves.
There are 20,000 gun control laws on the books.
Brookings Institution, the left-leaning think tank, disputes this because they modify it and they say there aren't 20,000 relevant laws, but that neglects all of the local laws and all of the local regulations.
A solid estimate, it's hard to tell because there are so many gun laws on the books, but a very solid estimate would be 20,000 and there may be many more than that.
That number, by the way, has been accepted for 50 years until recently because people don't want to believe that there are 20,000 gun laws on the books and they're still not stopping these incidents that we see on CNN. Democrat Representative John Dingell explained as early as 1965, quote, 20,000 laws governing the sale distribution and use of firearms.
By the way, interesting to note, 1965 was three years before the Gun Control Act of 1968, which was spurred by the deaths of RFK and Martin Luther King.
This was three years before that we had 20,000 laws on the books.
As for the semi-automatic rifle, they say, because they always go after the AR-15, because it looks, it's big and black and scary, is basically why the TV goes after it.
It's an easy target, even though it isn't like these sort of blacks, terrifying machine guns that we see, and fully automatic rifles that we see in war zones.
It isn't like that at all.
AR does not stand for assault rifle, it stands for Armalite, the company that makes it.
Even on that, if they want to ban semi-automatic rifles, you know, one pull, one bullet, the semi-automatic rifle has existed since 1885.
This wasn't invented in 1970, it wasn't invented in 1960, it wasn't invented in 1990.
It's been around for well over a century, and...
If we're going to remove that, we might as well go back to the musket, I suppose.
That's going to be the next call from them.
Another thing to note is mass shootings are not getting more frequent.
So the murder rate in 2011 was almost exactly the same as the raw number of murders in 1969.
But since we've added 110 million more Americans since then...
The murder rate in 1969 was about 55% higher than it is today.
Overall, the murder rate is declining precipitously.
So that gets to the point here.
We will never eradicate these crimes because the imagination of man's heart is evil from the beginning.
It is easy for left utopians to believe that eventually we can perfect human nature and stop war and stop violence.
But it ain't going to happen as long as human beings are around.
We've never seen any example of it in the history of the world.
Nothing we know from philosophy or history or biology suggests that will ever be the case.
There's also no evidence that the expiration of the assault weapons ban in 2004 has affected gun violence whatsoever.
Even Politico reports this.
All available evidence shows gun laws will not significantly affect incidents or severity of mass shootings.
Other studies show that large-capacity magazine bans, as have been advocated in recent years in my own home state of New York, conceal carry laws, have had little to no effect on mass shootings.
One way or the other.
Doesn't move the needle.
According to the FBI, in 2011, Yeah.
and uncaring and uncompassionate to even point out these numbers or name any facts when it comes to the debate, because unless you have a quivering lip, you're not considered an authority and not credible to talk on this topic.
According to the FBI in 2011, 323 people were killed by rifles of any type, bolt action, semi-automatic, the dreaded AR-15, 400, 496 people were killed by clubs or hammers that same year.
726 people were killed by hands or feet that year.
Twice as many as were killed by any kind of rifle, including assault weapons, so-called assault weapons.
And 1,694 people were murdered with knives.
Over five times as many people as were killed by rifles.
Rifles of any kind, including the AR-15, including the dreaded semi-automatic rifle that's existed since 1885.
Far and away, the biggest killer was handguns.
At 6,220 deaths, though 60% of those deaths were suicides, mostly among middle-aged men.
That's the bolts of this gun control argument.
Marco Rubio pointed this out a few years ago.
Even the Washington Post, even PolitiFact said it was true.
None of these laws that Democrats are...
Throwing out, vaguely throwing out, or specifically throwing out, and calling Republicans uncompassionate monsters for not taking them up.
None of those laws, not a single one of those laws, would have prevented any of these shootings that we've seen that are so horrific on television.
We have to get to the nut side of this equation, but before we get to that, we have got to talk about something a little bit nicer than this topic of the day.
Something that will certainly improve health.
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It's kind of like we were talking about nuts.
You know, nuts are good for your health.
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So, you know, we're always talking about ways to be healthier, happier on this show, have a more fulfilling life, and not be so angry in the news cycle all the time.
So, when tons of studies have shown that something improves your health, we have got to talk about it.
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People have noted this for decades and decades.
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There's this really cool thing.
You can look it up online.
They do something called the freezer test, because everyone sells omega-3s.
These are very common supplements.
A lot of people take them.
If you put them in the freezer...
The generic whatever brand.
And then Omax.
Omax Ultra Pure.
Omax 3 Ultra Pure Supplements.
When you take them out of the freezer, you'll notice that the Omax supplements look fine.
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And the other ones get all cloudy and disgusting.
That is because they're so pure.
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So, they're amazing at alleviating joint pain, muscle soreness.
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I obviously don't know anything about how one feels post-workout, but they make you feel good even if you don't do that.
They can also improve focus and memory, boost cardiovascular health, and more.
It just makes sense to take your daily omega-3 supplement.
There are no fish burps.
This is something people complain about with omega-3s, is that they'll get something called fish burps.
There are many on the market.
This is the purest, most concentrated one, so you don't have to worry about that.
And they even have a 60-day money-back guarantee.
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Don't they always in this life?
Okay.
On the nuts side of this equation, it is now virtually impossible to commit someone against his will to a mental institution.
All states now require that you prove clear and convincing evidence that someone is imminently dangerous to themselves or others.
Imminent means 24 to 72 hours.
If they're going to commit some awful thing in 24 to 72 hours, you maybe can commit them.
Otherwise, you can't.
People blame Ronald Reagan for this.
It actually was underway long before he arrived on the scene, though he was active in politics while these institutions closed.
There were 37,500 mental patients in California in 1959.
That was before the Gipper.
Reagan entered in 1967.
By that time the number was already down to 22,000.
It continued to decline and kept dropping for years.
This is in part because we had new drugs that would be able to hopefully cure people and not have them be faced there.
And there were also reports that these institutions weren't very nice.
Clearly this kid should have been institutionalized.
I won't even use his name.
He's a little demon from Florida.
I won't use his name.
He clearly should have been institutionalized.
When he was a little kid, he used to kill animals.
He posted on social media that he wanted to shoot up a school.
He was reported to the local authorities and to the FBI for saying these sorts of things, being an all-around weirdo.
His recently deceased mother apparently reported him to the police, sat down with the police and her son, and discussed what a deranged monster he is.
So...
Why aren't they talking about this?
Because it's harder for Democrats to argue for institutions, because that might be a partial solution to this problem.
It's much harder to say, well, we need to lock up lunatics.
So they have to keep demagoguing the gun control arguments that we know for certain.
We know with as much certainty as we can in public policy that they won't achieve anything because the only reason they're doing this is because they occasionally help Democrats achieve the only thing they really care about on this issue, raising money and winning re-election.
Speaking of kids who should be institutionalized, we are so lucky that we have our youth culture correspondent here, Andy Millennial.
Andy, thank you so much for coming.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, so I was wondering, we were talking about this shooting.
What is your take on this horrific shooting as a millennial?
You know, as a millennial, I have to say that this was a pretty good mass murder for me.
You know, I got some pictures on my cell phone.
Put them up on YouTube, and they got over 100,000 hits.
And then I even did a piece on, you know, a hit on CNN, which I thought was one of my better hits about how upset I was and how much I wanted gun control.
And I was going to, you know, I also put some pictures of myself crying, you know, because I was very upset about it.
My picture of crying got a lot of likes.
So I think people are really moved by my tears on Instagram, I think, that really.
So as mass murders go, I think I did pretty well here.
Have you considered, Andy, looking into an internship at CNN? You know, that's kind of my next step.
I think if I... You know, when you put the crying together with the gun control, you're basically a CNN anchor.
I will say, in every one of your appearances on this show, your ability to make your lip quiver has been really impressive.
It's been really, really good.
That's what I bring to the...
To the conversation.
You know, I was afraid that I was actually going to bite into this thing.
I love that we just had Tide Pods lying around in general.
I don't know what the animators are getting up to in the back there and the producers.
I've got to send you.
There are videos of people on the internet just chomping down into these, just detergent pouring out of their mouth.
We should say that we're not making fun, of course, of any of this terrible thing that happened, but it is insane what they do on TV. It's awful.
Actually, for that little back and forth, I have no compunction about doing that sort of thing whatsoever because it is so despicable.
What CNN does in these events.
They trot them out like these awful shootings.
They trot them out like the perfect little circus to push their ridiculous policies.
It's amazing.
And at the core of this, there are people genuinely suffering.
You know, I mean, it's a genuine atrocity.
And then it kind of goes out and radiates out.
And by the time it gets to CNN and to the networks, too, because they do it, too, they're just using these tears.
Yeah.
You know, as a kind of magic potion to sell their stupid gun control.
And they're using the tears to shut other people up.
To shut other people up, that's right.
They're using those tears to make us look uncompassionate because we want to look at the actual facts of the situation and try to do anything that might help it.
The funny thing is, I mean, funny, strange...
Is that really, if you looked at it rightly, liberals, leftists, and right-wingers could stand together and weep over what actually is happening, and then go to their corners and argue about what to do, and that would be the fair way to do it.
But because their ideas don't make any sense, and because the facts keep contradicting them, they just have to carry those tears on.
And when we say, let's wait until the emotions pass, they're going, how long must we wait?
You know, let's not wait.
Last time they were screaming that waiting itself was wrong, being reasonable itself was wrong.
Thoughts and prayers and waiting are wrong.
I know.
And CNN has now become like a tear fest.
It really is like being in a sorority where, like, these people going, all they do is cry.
Well, it's very funny because in my living room, it's also a tear fest when we watch CNN, just tears of laughter and joy when we keep them on.
Do you think, because you're right, they say that we can't wait, we can't have thoughts, we can't have prayers, we can't think, we can't mourn even together.
Is it Is it a weird twitch of materialism, of their thinking that thoughts and prayers are actually meaningless?
Oh, yeah.
Obviously, that has to play into it.
And is there...
Is there some aspect of this that is just...
They don't actually care about the event itself.
They just...
They're so frenzied in scoring points that they don't even see the tragedy.
They just jump to score the points.
It is amazing.
It seems to me to be...
I think...
I won't say that they don't care.
It seems to me a confusion of...
Their feelings with their thoughts.
Like, we really have lost the idea.
You know, it's the old Aristotelian idea that your inner state is important.
Your pleasures and your joy, your eudaimonia, whatever they call it.
Eudaimonia.
Thank you.
Only you would know that.
That's the only great word I know.
That it's important, but it has to be trained to attach itself to reason.
And they've lost that little part of it.
So what they think is, they think because they're upset, it matters.
It matters that they're upset.
And it doesn't.
I mean, it's the same way that college kids think, I'm offended by that.
My feeling is, you know...
Get some harder feelings.
Yeah, you need to build up those feelings calluses.
I mean, this is the sale from the left, is that everything is about your feelings.
And I think that's basically it.
It's not that they don't care.
It's that they think that the fact that they care gives them some moral high ground.
And it doesn't.
We all care.
We all care.
Of course we do.
Nobody wants to see this happen.
But that doesn't mean you're right.
You know what I think it is like?
I'll get us in more trouble for making this analogy.
There are a lot of sketches on the internet that go around about this problem.
You know when you come back and your girlfriend has had a hard day, she's really upset and there's some problem, and she's upset and you say, what's the problem?
And then your girlfriend tells you what the problem is, and then you say, okay, well I think the way you can fix it is this, this, and this.
She says, I don't want you to fix it.
I just want you to be sad with me.
You say, but all I'm trying to do, how dare you try to, that's what CNN is doing.
That's what the mainstream media do on these kind of issues.
We say, okay, we'd like to fix it.
We'd like to help you fix it.
You know, it really is womanish.
You know, I use the word womanish because it's actually the opposite.
Because it's a phenomenal word.
It's a great word.
It's the opposite of womanly.
It is to womanly what, like, macho is to manly.
Right.
Childish to childlike.
That's exactly right.
You know, it is womanish.
It is like having a woman who thinks, who cries so that you're willing to do anything just to get her to stop crying.
And that's what they think we're going to do.
Right.
And just, you know, after a while, guys catch on.
That's right.
It isn't going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
It isn't going to happen, CNN. Yeah.
Where do you see, you know, I was down, so that takes us through this topic.
What I want to know, I was down in Palm Beach at the Kudera Institute.
We were doing this panel a couple days ago on the future of American conservatism.
And we've got this awful future of mainstream media, maybe.
But it was me, it was Ramesh Ponaru from National Review, great guy, and Mike Frank from Hoover, and Al Felsenberg, who wrote the Buckley biography.
And I think I was the only covfefe advocate on the book.
Really?
Well, the National Review crowd.
National Review doesn't exactly love El Presidente.
I was certainly the most vocally pleased with this administration.
What is the future of American conservatism in the age of Trump?
Well, it's a really good question because Trump is important at least in two very specific ways.
I mean, one is...
The fact that he has shattered, I think that this is the thing that all these never-Trumpers and the intellectual anti-Trumpers do not understand.
He has shattered this glass bubble that has surrounded conservatism for 30 years, 40 years.
I mean, this idea that there are things you can't say, that there are ideas you can't introduce, that I'm crying, so don't say guns are good.
He shattered that, if only because he's too boorish in some ways to pay any attention to it.
He's not sensitive enough to see it.
I mean, this is something...
The slavery of political correctness is something that drives people crazy.
And it pushes them so far to the right, they go off the reservation.
It makes people overreact.
And, you know, when you look at Europe, where people can literally be harassed by the police for criticizing Islam or for saying certain things that are considered hateful, you know, it means that the elite are free to do whatever they want without us saying...
You're wrong.
You just, I'm sorry, I may wash cars for a living.
You may have a PhD, but you're wrong and I'm right.
So Trump has been really important and in that way he has been almost a totally a good thing.
The other way is this push toward what they call populism, and I'm not sure that's the right word for it, because what he has done is he has reconnected the Republican Party to that base that used to be part of Reagan's party.
It actually used to be Democrats.
They were the Reagan Democrats, right?
Yeah, and he has reconnected to them, and we lose touch with them.
It's funny because you and I are probably people who would lose touch with them because we are theoretical, we think and sometimes people are going, "Yeah, but I can't feed my kids." What do I do here?
And to have some intellectual conservative saying, well, you know, this is wrong and that's wrong, you've got to answer the question first.
Am I going to lose my job?
How deeply has he read Tocqueville?
I know that he's going to reform your taxes and create jobs and growth, but how deeply has he read Strauss and Tocqueville?
That's right.
So you have to come up with other kinds of answers.
Trump has been bad for conservatism in that way, in a certain way, because he does not care.
He doesn't care that we need to reform entitlements.
And, you know, the arguments for reform entitlements are simple.
People live longer.
It used to be that you collected at 65, but you died at 63.
It doesn't cost as much.
As when you're collecting at 80.
So I think that this is the part of Trump that we have to deal with.
It's not the tweets.
It's not the rudeness.
Those are things that actually are working in our favor.
It is the spending and the fact that he never...
Even though in the old days he used to talk about debt, he didn't run on that.
He doesn't seem to care.
And that is something we're going to have to confront at some point because we do go off the cliff.
I do wonder, this is really maybe the optimistic side here, is I wonder if he could...
Nixon in China when it comes to entitlements because he signaled it a few months ago, I felt.
I thought that he was using the phrase welfare reform to hint at entitlement reform because these are welfare programs.
I thought Rubio and Ryan started to move in that direction.
We don't know.
He said, I'm not going to touch social security.
But when it comes to the big spending, the big spending sends shivers up my spine.
But if he's going to spend a little more domestically on whatever programs he's going to do, he's going to beef up the military.
That is a drop in the bucket compared to the long-term liability of entitlements.
If he somehow came around to that, it would be the most excellent presidency.
It would be.
It would be an amazing presidency.
It's been an amazing presidency so far.
One of the things about Trump is that he has such a big character that the bigness of his character obscures who he is in some way.
So, for instance, is he a guy who sleeps with porn stars?
Probably.
Do I care?
No.
I do not care.
Do I think that's a good thing to do?
No.
But is that what he does for me?
No.
He runs the government for me.
That's what I pay him to do.
So...
He is a guy who learns stuff, and he is a guy who will make an argument to his base that's unpopular.
He will go back to his...
I mean, with the DACA thing, where he's saying, you know, yes, I will give you a path to citizenship, but I want this, this, this, and this.
And if he doesn't get that, he won't sign.
He's willing to do that.
And he does learn stuff in office, and he is willing to go back to his base.
So it wouldn't shock me If he said, you know what, I said I wasn't going to cut entitlements, I'm not going to cut them, but I am going to reform them.
Take them a little later because you're going to live 20 years longer.
And he can do that.
He always levels with people.
He writes about it, or somebody wrote about it, and he at least read it, in The Art of the Deal, which is that he'll ask for 99% in order to get 51%.
It's really a lovely thing that he does as a politician that all these other politicians would try to worm their way into, once they flip-flopped, trying to explain how they didn't flip-flop.
And Trump just sort of says, I don't know, yeah, now this is what I think.
Before I thought this, and now I think this.
I know, he does.
And so there is that chance.
You know, I don't understand.
Conservatism has always ridden on the back of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party has not been conservative.
Almost ever, basically.
Ever, ever.
And the fact, the two...
Most conservative presidents we've had in my lifetime were Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton after Newt Gingrich.
Is that what Bill Clinton believed?
I don't think Bill Clinton believed anything.
He did what he could get away with, yeah, on both sides of that equation.
And he was a good conservative president.
This guy has been a great conservative president, Trump, and he's a belligerent guy who sleeps with porn stars.
That's also true.
I can live with that.
He's not my son-in-law.
I don't have to worry about who he's sleeping with.
So it's like...
One thing confuses me about the followers of Bill Buckley, and I count myself among them, so I'm confused by those at National Review and other places who say that it's so awful that he doesn't articulate these high-minded principles and he isn't always talking about these abstractions.
Bill Buckley, by the end of his life, criticized vehemently the George Bush II administration for dealing primarily in abstractions, for dealing in what he called Wilsonianism, Wilsonian conservatives.
He criticized that aspect of conservatism immensely.
And here, I think we have the response to that.
We have something that is clearly not abstract.
It's very tangible.
The words he uses are tangible.
The policies he's advocating are tangible.
And it is bizarre to me that the conservative movement, in the light of Bill Buckley, would ignore what he was talking about for the last several years of his life.
You know, I'm perfectly willing to sit and have a conversation about the moral hazards down the line of having a president who says some of the things he says.
I'm willing to have that conversation.
What I'm not willing to do is sacrifice present gains for things that may or may not happen because I'm afraid they'll happen or I can picture them happening.
When you sit and think of what would have happened, all these guys who didn't vote for Donald Trump and said, they're too evil for me to vote for them.
You know, when you think what would have happened with the Hillary Clinton presidency, the judges who would now be in place, and I don't, this whole idea of, well, Republicans would have stopped her, when have they ever stopped anything?
They don't stop anything.
Yeah, they don't stop anything.
They can barely, they can barely govern conservatively with Donald Trump in the White House.
So, you know, the judges who would have been in place, I really do believe we would have lost the Second Amendment.
I think the First Amendment would have been gutted.
It would have been gutted.
She was campaigning on gutting the First Amendment.
She was campaigning on gutting it.
And so I think that we dodged a bullet.
We didn't dodge it any thanks to them.
I think that they should all stand up.
I mean, I voted for him, but I stood up and said, look, I opposed him.
I think he's done a good job.
Hey, I don't know the future.
I'm doing the best I can.
We both variously did TV commercials for Ted Cruz.
That's right.
Absolutely.
Speaking of porn stars.
But ultimately, I came around and voted for him, too, and I'm very pleased that I did.
I understood the arguments not to.
I understand that that's compelling in some way.
But now that we know, looking back on this phenomenal year we've gotten, I don't think there's any way to say, oh, I'm glad I didn't vote for the guy.
Yeah, and I am more than willing to say, like, I don't like this new budget.
I think he's, you know, I don't like the fact that he's not thinking about the debt.
I think the debt matters, and I think it's a problem.
And I think he knows it's a problem.
He's a businessman.
He understands it's a problem.
You know, I'm perfectly willing to criticize him.
What I'm not willing to criticize him on is every damn thing he says, especially when CNN and the rest, I'm now using CNN as a, you know, a...
What is it called?
It's a metonym.
Yeah, it's a metonym.
I've got all these obscure words that are just coming out today.
I love coming in.
You know, but the press takes everything he says and spins it to its worst possible meaning.
So if he comes in and he says there are good people on both sides of the Robert E. Lee statue equation, oh my God, he's siding with white supremacists.
Right, right.
I'm just not going to do it.
I'm not going to appease it.
I'm not going to give it any credence whatsoever.
But I will criticize him on policy.
Every president should be criticized on policy.
Nobody's above criticism.
I just think he's doing a good job.
And this, by the way, people say that we've always held our conservative leaders to account.
Bill Buckley in 1968.
He endorsed Richard Nixon over his good friend Ronald Reagan.
He endorsed him for president because he felt he was more viable.
He was tested.
He went in there.
Nixon did a bunch of terrible things, founded the EPA, a number of other agencies, and Bill Buckley still defended him because of the practical concern is I'm not going to knock him on these little things.
Overall, we're getting decent policy out of the guy until China, until he felt that his His stance on the Soviet Union and communism was too weak.
Then he turned on him.
But it wasn't this, I'll hit him here, I won't hit him there, I'll hit him here, I don't like this.
He made his decision.
There's a long history in the conservative movement.
And I hope that what we see for the future of the conservative movement is kind of fusionism, but whatever that is for the 21st century.
Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I can live with a lot of liberal, you know, annoying liberal things, and I can even live with a welfare state if we can keep the welfare state under control and keep it reasonable.
I think we're old enough at this point to support a welfare state.
It actually does.
Keep people from panicking at some level.
But when it gets up to the European world or the world that Obama imagined in that video he did, The Life of Julia, where every minute that you live is governed by the state, I start to think, no, we've got to dial this back.
I believe so deeply in individual freedom.
And I'm going to fight that.
You have to fight that every day.
Every day they're against it.
And so if I win today, that's a victory.
And if tomorrow Donald Trump becomes, you know, a bad guy, then that'll be tomorrow's problem.
If I win today, that's a victory.
If I eat a Tide Pod tomorrow, somebody else will have to win that victory for me.
I just want to know how stupid these people are.
I mean, what on earth has happened to our children that they are putting soap detergent in them?
Just delicious, delicious laundry detergent.
Well, if you have any extras out there, save some for me after this segment.
I got them fried now.
Anti-millennial, ladies and gentlemen, the youth cultural correspondent.
We've got to go.
We've got to say goodbye to YouTube and Facebook.
Obviously, I'm not talking to anybody on YouTube right now because they censor.
Anytime they see my swarthy complexion come on, they immediately censor whatever videos we have.
So if you're on Facebook, though, you've got to go to dailywire.com right now.
What do you get?
You get the Michael Knowles show.
You get the Andrew Klavan show, who bears a striking resemblance to anti-millennial.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get, you know, the mailbag questions.
You get blah, blah, blah.
But you get this, guys.
And, you know, CNN, this is not only the FDA-approved vessel for all salty leftist tiers, but especially the demagogic CNN leftist tiers.
It's really good for those, and I think it's the only safe way to store them.
So make sure to go to dailywire.com right now.
now, we'll be back with the mailbag.
All right, we're running a little late, so I'm gonna burn through these mailbag questions.
First one, from Zachary.
Dr.
Knowles, I need your expert opinion.
My doctor recently told me I consume too much salt and that I need to change my diet.
I, of course, figured as much, given the approximately two gallons.
Of delicious and salty leftist tears that I consume daily.
What are my options?
Obviously, cutting back on my main source of sustenance would not be ideal.
Should I dilute them with some covfefe?
Pray that lefties stop crying altogether.
Help.
Thank you, as always, Zach.
First of all, you've got to be very careful with covfefe.
Covfefe is a hell of a drug.
Don't you use that lightly.
Second of all, lefties will never stop crying.
Pray as you might.
Only at the end of the earth, at the second coming, is there a chance?
And then they'll be really sad that, you know, they were wrong about But then maybe they'll be happy and joyful.
You have to ignore your doctor.
Ignore him.
I don't know how long he's going to last.
We talk sometimes about supplements and nutrients on here.
Don't believe the hype.
Nutrition pyramids and everything changes all the time.
Keep guzzling those leftist tears.
You might actually want to increase your consumption.
Next question from Tyler.
Hey Michael, when are we getting your second book, Covfefe, The Art of the Troll?
Actually, my real question is, I have been a Christian all my life and was wondering if you had any great tips on studying the Bible.
Where should I start?
Thank you.
Huge fan of the show.
Yeah, Leviticus.
It's a great page-turner.
You've got a lot of leprous sores that you can read about.
It's really strong.
You should start with Genesis because it's like the greatest book ever written and you could read it.
I always start these Bible in a year things and then I fall off at some point.
So I've read Genesis a lot.
I've read it a number of times, whereas Leviticus is a little tougher to slog through.
I would start with Genesis.
You might want to skip to the end.
The first time I ever really engaged with the Bible...
I skipped to the dessert and read the New Testament first, and that might be rather nice.
I know the Catholic Church and several other Bible reading programs have one Old Testament, one New Testament, one Epistle or Psalm that you can read every day.
I like reading it in order, though, in the order that it was compiled and written.
So, that's my Bible in your program, but just keep doing it even when you have to slog through the relatively boring parts, because the relatively boring parts, like the begat, begat, begat, all the genealogies, all of the rules, they do actually tell you something just in themselves, just in their inclusion, and what kind of a meta-literary statement about what they're saying is really interesting, even if as you're reading it, your eyes are rolling in the back of your head.
Next question from Becky.
Hi, Michael.
I listened to your show on Tuesday night and you got me curious.
How did Galileo die and by whose hand, if any?
And why have we been told that it was the fault of the Catholic Church?
Really enjoy your show.
Thanks.
Thanks, Becky.
So, Galileo died peacefully at home in 1642, January 8th, I believe, after he had a fever and heart palpitations.
No torture, nobody sniping at him or anything.
He died of natural causes.
The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II, wanted him buried in the Basilica di Santa Croce.
Pope Urban VIII and Cardinal Barberini objected to this because Galileo was a huge jerk to everybody and called the Catholic clergy idiots.
So they buried him in a less prominent room off of the chapel rather than in the main area of the basilica.
But About 80 years later, they reburied Galileo in the main body of the basilica anyway.
Basically the most incredible honor you could ever possibly get in the church to be buried in the Basilica di Santa Croce.
Now, he didn't get reburied before losing three fingers and a tooth for some relics, one of which is now at the Museo Galileo in Florence.
The reason why you hear all of this misinformation that the Catholics tortured him and killed him or whatever is that the Anglosphere is quite Protestant.
Henry VIII assured us of that, and he ensured that because he wanted to chop off some of his wives' heads and get some new ones.
You know, people have always hated the Church, and G.K. Chesterton talked about this a lot.
He talked about it in Orthodoxy, actually, before he converted to Catholicism, but I think the Church he's talking about here is quite clearly the Catholic Church.
The church is attacked for opposite reasons, and that's one argument that Chesterton gives for it being right.
So the church is attacked for cloistering women, taking women away from the family and cloistering them in these little nunneries.
And also it's attacked for insisting on procreation, be fruitful and multiply, no artificial contraception.
Right.
It's attacked for both of those things.
It's taught, it's attacked for disrespecting women's intellects.
And it's, it's also attacked because only women ever go to church.
Only women participate in the church.
It's attacked for being too ascetic, sackcloth, dry peas.
When you whip yourself, mea culpa, mea culpa.
It's also attacked for being too pompous and ritualistic and dripping in gold.
I think those are the reasons they just, people, especially in the Anglosphere, just don't really like the Catholic church.
But one of the reasons people don't like the church as far as I'm concerned is because it's true, because it's the right thing.
And it tells us right there in the Bible that they're going to feel that way.
Next question, from Christian, providentially from Christian.
Hey Mike, where do you see the U.S. in 10 years in regards to culture, mores, values, etc.?
I actually see it getting a little bit better.
People forget how crazy the PC culture was that really took effect in the 1990s.
I see that getting better.
Murder rates are going down, divorce rates are going down, abortion rates are going down.
Those are all excellent cultural things.
I do see it getting more divided, unfortunately, because there isn't a common culture anymore.
Television basically doesn't exist anymore.
People are cutting their cable faster than ever.
There was a great common culture when there were just a few networks.
It was the liberal consensus.
The conservative movement, in many ways, actually fought to crack up that common culture because it was a bit of a left culture.
So there's no common culture in terms of pop culture.
There's no common religious culture, We have religious pluralism, but largely we just have a lot of nuns, the so-called nuns, the atheists, the agnostics.
I do see a little bit of that changing because I get so many questions about religion throughout the mailbag.
I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, but just in talking with millennials, they seem to be a little bit more open to some of those questions.
So I'm hopeful for the future, but I see it getting much more divided.
And as we talked about on the show a few days ago, you can't stretch those bonds forever.
This whole citizen of the world nonsense and hating one's own culture and kneeling for the flag, totally bizarrely, for a flag that gives you the right to kneel for the flag so it makes no sense to kneel for it.
That can't be stretched forever.
At a certain point, it's going to crack.
And people should be careful of that.
And fortunately, we have a president right now who is a pop culture figure Who is also perfectly willing to attack these awful aspects of the culture.
Next question from Grace.
How do you suggest we balance privacy and national security?
Grace, the girl from Twitter who has a date with you tonight.
I told you never to call me here.
I told you.
No, I think Grace is referring to my conversation yesterday on Valentine's Day, which was marketed as a date with Michael Knowles, and I hope I didn't disappoint you.
Buckley wrote of the need to bring terrorists to justice after 9-11.
Quote, We should always give solicitous attention to liberty.
What we are struggling to do right now is to discover how 15 steel-willed enemies of the U.S. succeeded in destroying the two largest buildings in New York and one part of the Pentagon.
That finding the hidden enemy would require Yankee ingenuity and a couple of days off for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Makes sense to me.
The way we have to do it is by making the bureaucratic agencies more accountable, at least to congressional oversight.
So right now, the bureaucratic agencies can infringe on all of our civil liberties, as we saw happened with the Trump campaign.
Barack Obama spying on the Trump campaign.
We saw that happen without much congressional oversight.
Took a lot for Congress to be able to see that.
I don't think we need to make it so transparent that the public sees these things, but at least our elected representatives have to have ready access to this so that we, the people, can hold them to account, at least through our representatives.
That seems to be a nice way of balancing both national security and civil liberties.
From Benjamin.
Hey bud, I love the show.
I'm taking my wife and kids to D.C. in April.
Have you ever been there?
If so, what was a must do or see in good local restaurants?
Thank you so much.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time in D.C. You've got to go see the Lincoln Memorial.
Obviously, you can't do that without crying.
The monuments at night are great.
When I was in college, we would do drunk monuments.
That was our favorite thing to do in Washington, D.C.
We'd go have a few drinks and then just gaze at the majesty of this country.
You gotta go to Shelley's Backroom Cigar Bar.
It's fabulous.
I went there with the CEO of Daily Wire just a few months ago.
You gotta go to the Gold House, the Trump Hotel, and order the steak burnt with ketchup, the Porter House.
Old Ebbets is the best.
That is a D.C. institution.
After 11, I think, they have Dollar Oysters and cheap PBR. A great place.
Really, you have to go there.
National Portrait Gallery is wonderful.
And there's some good theater there as well.
People don't know that, but you can check it out.
You should ask your congressman to get you a tour of the White House.
I've never done that, but I have been to meetings at the Executive Office building, and it's unbelievable to go do that.
You should do it.
From Keene.
Next question.
What is the future of conservatism, in your opinion, after the conference?
We talked about this a little bit, but just a few other points.
I'm pretty pleased because I think there is a future to conservatism.
The fusionism of Bill Buckley, Cold War anti-communism, libertarian economics, and social conservatism doesn't really make sense after the fall of communism.
That central thing kind of fell apart.
Buckley came to oppose the Iraq war, as we said, as a Wilsonian abstraction.
This is what I mean by rationalism when we talk about that on the show.
I think we're going to see a more Burkean conservative thought in the future.
Chesterton, speaking of Chesterton, said, if you argue with a madman, it is probably that you will get the worst of it.
For, in many ways, his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity or by the dumb certainties of experience.
He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections.
Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is, in this respect, a misleading one.
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.
The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
I think we see this a little bit in conservatism.
There's an ossified rationalist conservatism that I think we're seeing clinked away by the realities of our culture, by the realities of seeing Antifa beat up Ben Shapiro attendees at college campuses.
And I hope that we can now get a conservatism that relies a little bit more on tradition.
And, you know, the 80s were great.
But those policies sort of ossified into a bean counting that a renewed interest in the tradition in light of cultural chaos may propel through its sheer appreciation of mystery and wonder.
I think we'll see that with a little more religion, too.
From Christina.
Hey, so Valentine's question.
I got my fiancé a man crate for Valentine's and he got me a necklace that I hate.
Do I tell him I hate it or just deal with a gift I'll never use?
And if I should tell him, how do I? First of all, marry me.
What a wonderful, what a great fiance to get a man crate for her fiance.
If he were your boyfriend, I would say deal with it, but he's your fiance.
You're gonna have to live with him forever, so be honest with him.
You don't want him getting you ugly jewelry for the rest of your life.
He'll get over it.
It's not a big deal.
I did this to sweet little Lisa.
I bought her a bracelet she doesn't like when we were 16.
And she basically threw it in a drawer and never wore it again.
And that's okay now.
I don't get those bracelets.
From Jennifer...
Hi, Michael.
I'm a big fan of yours.
I'm wondering if you plan on doing any speaking tours anytime soon.
Also, I'd love to get your take on why the Olympics would even allow such a repressive regime as North Korea to compete and be able to show face.
I am speaking around soon.
I can't give too many details yet.
I'll be in New York giving a speech in March, at least one speech, and I think I've got one booked in Alabama coming up.
If you're interested in seeing a speech or someone hosting, excuse me, Just send in that inquiry in the mailbag or to michael at dailywire.com and I'll make sure that we can get it on the books.
And why did the Olympics allow these repressive monsters?
Because the Olympics hates America.
It's all just about hating America.
That's why NBC loves it so much.
I don't really watch much of the Olympics.
From Corey, final question.
We've got to burn through this.
We're running late.
From Corey, I always enjoyed your show and even your acting in another kingdom.
Thank you.
Now I feel like I can't even watch you speak anymore.
Your smugness over the gay marriage issue was mind-blowing.
I've got three questions.
Why do you care?
Why were you so smug about it?
Do you believe this issue is worth pushing gays further left?
I sincerely hope you can offer some secular answers.
Thank you for watching the show and listening to Another Kingdom.
I appreciate that.
I will point out one thing.
In your question, in all three of your questions, you don't once refute my argument.
Do you notice that?
So I hope that my views don't come off as smug.
Listen, I've been wearing a lot of bow ties and smoking jackets recently, so I forgive people if they think that's smug, and I'm sorry if I've given that impression.
What I do think, though, is what you call smug, I think, is...
Because I offered an opinion confidently that differs from your own.
And I offered it and said, this is my opinion.
This is the reality as I see it.
And you find that smug because it's certainly not politically correct.
And right now, this is the touchiest issue.
I hope that my opinions come off as clear and disinterested.
It is not an emotional issue for me, obviously.
It might be an emotional issue for someone who very much wants to redefine marriage because he or she is gay or something like that.
For me, it isn't emotional.
It's just a clinical question of language, biology, and tradition.
I'm perfectly willing to give a secular answer on these things, but there's a question that There aren't secular answers.
I think even that's a little bit of a euphemism.
Secular means atheist.
I'm perfectly willing to give an answer that is acceptable to non-Christians or acceptable to atheists, but there aren't atheist answers because atheism isn't true.
Basically, in all ways, atheism doesn't make any sense, so you might find that my answer makes sense, but I'm not giving an atheist answer.
I'm giving an answer that is acceptable to atheists.
This is why no conservatives these days are willing to wade into the question of gay marriage.
They think it's too touchy.
It's the great cultural taboo of the last few years.
Conservatives are afraid of seeming bigoted because we all have gay friends.
And I'm not worried about that because this clearly isn't about bigotry at all.
We're not talking about sodomy laws.
We're not talking about whether gay people ought to be able to do whatever they like with one another, whether they ought to be accepted and treated equally and fairly by society and culture and government.
We're not talking about any of those things.
We're talking about one question.
What is marriage?
So I have gay friends who got hitched at the courthouse and the minute that gay marriage became the new definition, and I have friends who have been together for decades who did not go to the courthouse and get hitched because they think that marriage doesn't include same-sex couples.
Practically, those same groups of people behave the same way, right?
They behave in a monogamous, same-sex relationship with all of the trials and tribulations and nice things that come out of that.
But there's disagreement even among gay people on this question.
The question, why do you care?
Because I'm involved in mankind.
I don't know, why do I care about U.S. policy in Taiwan, right?
Because no man is an island, entire of himself.
I am a person with faculties of reason, and the question of marriage is fundamental to culture and society.
The question, why do you care, is enough to get me to care.
The left always does this.
They say, why do you care about What pronouns we use.
Who cares?
What do you care about saying Merry Christmas?
Well, I don't know.
Why do you care?
Okay, if it's not a big deal, then why don't we not change the definition of marriage we've had for the entirety of history until five minutes ago?
If it doesn't matter, if you don't care, then why don't we just accept Barack Obama's view of marriage as late as 2012?
You know, for the question, why were you so smug about it?
I hope I wasn't smug.
I don't mean to be smug.
I am fairly certain that we should proceed with caution when radically redefining the building block of society.
I'm fairly certain of that.
I hope that certainty doesn't seem smug.
Is the issue worth pushing gaze further left?
I hope it doesn't push gaze further left.
I don't think it will.
Because most importantly, I think conservatives should respect gay people and respect them enough to speak frankly and logically and not sentimentally and bizarrely.
Gay people are not some infantilized group that has to be mollycoddled and protected from logic and reason.
And they're not only thinking with their sexual thoughts.
That's not the only aspect of them.
They're people.
They're not just this one, flat, two-dimensional sexual issue.
That's ridiculous.
And offensive to them, not to me.
You took issue with my suggestion that perhaps sexual difference has something to do with marriage.
That perhaps the definition of marriage held almost exclusively from civilization, you know, from the dawn of man until about 30 months ago.
The view of marriage held by Barack Obama as progressive a politician as ever there was until very recently.
That perhaps that definition isn't entirely incorrect.
None of your questions refuted a single substantive point in my argument.
You asked a question about my psychology, you accused me of being smug, and you asked a question about political practicality.
Nowhere in those three questions did you refute a single point I made.
If you think the arguments made by either Father Schmitz or myself are wrong, refute them, and we'll talk about it in the mailbag.
If you can't, I encourage you to consider whether it is possible that perhaps it is not we, but you, who aren't seeing this issue quite right.
I hope that wasn't too smug.
That's our show today.
We are going to have a show tomorrow because obviously we didn't have a show yesterday.
So be sure to tune in for that.
We'll save you from one day of the Clavenless weekend.
We'll save you a little bit from it.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Show.
I will see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
