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April 9, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
37:27
Ep. 135 - A Nation Of Drug Addicts

Politicians from both parties harp on the opioid epidemic. But America’s drug problem goes far deeper than prescription painkillers. We’ll analyze how and why the U.S. became a nation of drug addicts. Then, Frank J. Flemming joins to talk about his new novel Sidequest: In Realms Ungoogled. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Politicians from both parties are sounding the alarm bell on the opioid epidemic.
But America's drug problem goes far deeper than prescription painkillers.
We will analyze how and why the U.S. became a nation of drug addicts.
Then, Frank J. Fleming joins to talk about his new novel, SideQuest, in realms ungoogled and conservative satire writ large.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
We're a nation of drug addicts.
But before we talk about all the bad things that you can put into your bodies, we have to keep the lights on and talk about a good thing that you can put into your bodies.
Because not everything that you put into your body is bad.
You drink water and you eat food.
And you can take some supplements which are nutritional.
They're not pharmaceutical.
They're not...
You know, drugs or something like that.
They are just nutritional supplements.
And one of the best ones, and a great sponsor of the program, is Omax 3 Ultra Pure Supplements.
The fact is, taking care of your health is a commitment, and it can feel overwhelming.
Now, you know, for me, I don't really like to exercise or eat right or do anything like that.
But you can take a supplement.
That'll help you out a little bit.
That would be Omax 3.
There are big health benefits that come with that, and you don't even have to think about it.
It is the purest way to get all of these daily Omega-3s, Omax-3 Ultra Pure, because you're going to do something.
If you're going to do it, why not do it right?
So it's the purest option.
You know, sometimes with these supplements, you get the fish burps, because it's fish oil, so it doesn't taste very good.
It's not good.
You don't want that.
There are many Omega-3s on the market.
This is the purest, most concentrated one.
You will not get fish burps.
Omega-3s are great at alleviating joint pain, muscle soreness, they can improve focus and memory, boost cardiovascular health, and more.
It just makes sense to take it.
Omax Ultra Pure is 93% pure omega-3 fatty acids.
So there's this test you can do.
It's the freezer test.
You put omega-3s, these little capsules, in the freezer, and most of the store brands, you know, they'll all get cloudy and gross when you take them out, but Omax is...
That you don't need to worry about that.
It'll still be basically clear.
OMAX 3 comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee, so you will have plenty of time to try it and really feel the OMAX difference.
Right now, go to tryomax.com slash covefe, C-O-V-F-E-F-E, and get a box of OMAX 3 Ultra Pure for free.
That is tryomax.com slash covfefe, C-O-V-F-E-F-E, to get your free box of OMAX 3.
That is tryomax.com slash covfefe.
Terms and conditions apply.
They always do in this life, but they're really good.
Okay.
Now to the bad things that you can put in your bodies.
We're a nation of drug addicts.
We are a nation of drug addicts.
Politicians talk about this all the time.
Here's just a quick little montage.
But if we don't get tough on the drug dealer's We're wasting our time.
Just remember that.
We're wasting our time.
As you all know from personal experience, families, communities, and citizens across our country are currently dealing with the worst drug crisis in American history.
I now have five family friends who have lost their adult children to opioid overdose.
And so in some of these states that have been hit hard with the opioid and fentanyl epidemic...
Again, we need funding for opioid epidemic.
The president talked about that.
Show us the money.
They're actually all right.
Even Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, like, chokes me to get that out of my throat.
But they are all right.
There's this awful opioid epidemic.
The epidemic that's going on.
Nancy, though, she says, show us the money, show us the money.
Nancy, you are a member of Congress.
That is where legislation begins.
That's where funding bills are supposed to originate.
So, I don't know, you do the money, Nancy.
A little frustrating with her, but they're absolutely right.
Now, you know, now we say that the White House does everything.
Congress used to have some power, but now it's the White House does everything.
But at least, at the very least, everybody is concerned about this because it's a huge issue.
Now, opioids, we use that term.
That includes opiates.
That's the older term, morphine.
Now it also includes synthetics like hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, codeine, painkillers.
We just used to call them painkillers.
And they're right about this.
Every single day, 115 Americans die from overdosing on opioids and all of these things.
The statistics are staggering here.
In 2015, and the situation has gotten worse since 2015, but just in 2015, 2 million people in the U.S. suffered from substance abuse disorders from opioid painkillers.
Another nearly 600,000 suffered from heroin addiction.
There was a little overlap there because they're so similar.
Between 21 and 30% of people who are prescribed opioids misuse them.
So there's this problem of prescription.
You go in and these things are prescribed very loosely.
They're obviously overprescribed.
But then 21 to 30% of people who get the prescription, just of the people who get the prescription, misuse it.
Of those people, 8 to 12% develop a disorder.
Of all the people who are prescribed opioids, 4 to 6% of people who misuse the prescription painkillers then start using heroin.
These are huge numbers.
80% of heroin users actually began from opioids.
They first used prescription opioids, and then they moved on to heroin.
Opioid overdoses increased a full 30% between July 2016 and September 2017 in 45 states.
In basically a year, you're looking at a 30% increase.
This is massive.
One year.
Midwestern states...
The rest of the country is a walk in the park compared to the Midwest.
The Midwest saw an increase of 70% over that time.
Large cities saw an increase of 54% in 16 states.
Same exact period of time.
Those are huge numbers.
You can't ignore them.
But the drug problem in America isn't just opioids.
We're focusing on that.
It is the most bizarre spike just within a year or so.
But there's a lot that's going on.
Even use marijuana, the old Haitian oregano.
Marijuana use has sharply increased in the United States in the last few years.
Now, you might think, well, Michael, there's a time and a place for everything, and that's college.
Sure.
And you might say, well, you know, we're legalizing it everywhere.
It's being destigmatized.
It's probably because of all this legislation.
That would be common sense, but it would be wrong.
There's a new study in addiction, in the journal Addiction, that shows that this isn't because of legalization.
The spike in pot use has nothing to do with these laws.
That study finds, quote, medical and recreational marijuana policies did not have any significant association with increased marijuana use.
And yet, there is a steep rise in pot-smoking hippies since 2005.
There is a steep rise.
And look, I'm not like some old fogey on this and like scolding the kids and everything.
Sometimes libertarians and conservatives are asked, what do you think about marijuana legalization?
And my answer is always the same.
I oppose it.
Not because of the legislation itself, I don't really care, but because of the people who really want it legalized.
I just want to make them sad.
That is my argument for it.
These people, you know, they're like sort of libertarians.
They come out and all they care about is legalizing dope.
What a dope.
Absolutely not.
I'm going to make it doubly illegal.
I'm going to mandatory 45-year minimum sentences only for that political activism.
That's a sidebar.
Still on pot, though, according to a Yahoo News Marist survey, 35 million Americans use pot on a monthly basis.
So that's over a tenth of the country.
Over one in ten people smoke pot or eat a brownie or tea or something on a monthly basis, and 55 million Americans have used pot in the last year.
Huge numbers.
More people smoke pot than tobacco in the United States.
This is very depressing to me because I don't like cigarettes.
Cigarettes are kind of gross and they're not very high quality tobacco.
But I love cigars.
Now, if I go into a concert or something and I light up a little cigar or cigarette or something, I will be arrested.
I'll probably be brought to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation.
But if I smoke pot, it's fine.
There are people, you know, especially in California now, if you're smoking pot down the street, nobody will bother you.
If you smoke a cigarette, people will scowl at you.
They will look at you like you are the devil or something.
Very bizarre.
That's just the pot.
Drinking is also on the rise.
Drinking rose substantially between 2002 and 2013, according to a new study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
And I'm pretty sure the authors of this study didn't consult me, but I think it's because I went to college during that time period.
So I suspect single-handedly I caused this rise in drinking.
The social science does show some other explanations as well.
Drinking rose 11% just during that time frame.
11 years, I guess.
Among women, drinking rose 58%.
Among older people, it rose 65%.
That's staggering numbers in just around a decade.
Alcoholism, so not just people drinking, you know, look, I'll have a casual 17 to 25 drinks per day when I'm hanging around the daily wire.
That's just casual.
That's just to get through the day.
But alcoholism, alcohol abuse, rose 50% during that time period among Americans.
Among women, alcoholism rose 83.7%.
Staggering numbers.
But it isn't just that.
It isn't just the pot.
It isn't just the opioids.
It isn't just the booze.
The big issue, and the New York Times did a good story on this over the weekend.
I know you'll probably think you're on drugs when you heard me say that.
The New York Times did do a good story.
Every once in a while they do this, and it was on antidepressants.
And this is, I think, the heart of the matter today.
I think the antidepressants tell us a lot about the state of the country, and they tell us a lot about maybe what's missing.
Antidepressants have been around in various forms since the 1950s, but modern antidepressants, the SSRIs that you maybe have heard of, statistically speaking, you're probably on them, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, they've only been around since the late 80s in any popular world.
And the use of them has skyrocketed.
Just in recent years, very recent years, two or three years, 25 million Americans have been on antidepressants for at least two years.
There's a lot more to talk about with this, but before we get to that, you know, I guess it's really divine intervention.
Before we talk about the real crux of this matter, the antidepressants, we have to go back in time and talk about my favorite one, which is wine.
Yeah.
Very providential ad today.
I love wine.
You love wine.
You don't want to drink wine to excess.
You don't want to end up in the gutter.
You don't want to say like, you know, fella, I was like you once.
You don't want to end up like me on the 200th episode.
And you don't want to have little pink elephants chasing you around.
But everything in moderation.
Wine has been around for a long time.
The first miracle performed by our risen Lord was to turn water into wine.
The water of ritual into the wine of celebration.
And Wink has a wonderful product.
I really, really like them.
And so the trouble with wine, as you might know, especially for me, is I don't really know that much about it.
I know a lot about cigars.
I don't know anything about wine.
So you go to the wine store and you just think like, okay, how are these people going to rip me off now?
What is going to be?
It all sort of tastes wet, so I guess that's it.
Wink makes this much easier for you.
So Wink, W-I-N-C, makes it very easy to discover great wine.
Their wine experts select wines matched to your taste, personalized for you, shipped right to your door, and starting at just $13 a bottle.
There's nothing like coming home to a crate of delicious Wink wine selected just for you.
It is the best day of your month.
So what you do is you fill out their palate quiz.
I took it.
And it's not questions like, hey, do you like to get drunk?
Yeah, I do.
No, that's not...
That's not...
We're a little more sophisticated here.
It's questions like, you know, how do you like salt?
How do you take your coffee?
It's much more of a connoisseurship.
And so you answer that, and they will send you wines curated to your taste.
The more wines you rate, the more personalized your monthly selections.
Each month there are new delicious wines, like the very popular Summer Water Rosé, which is the most masculine drink many people tell me, the Rosé.
It's, you know, it kind of like hides the masculinity behind a beautiful, delicious pink patina.
There are no membership fees.
You can skip any month, cancel any time.
Shipping is covered.
You don't have to worry about that.
If you don't like a bottle that they send you, they will replace it with a bottle that you will love.
No questions asked.
I usually send back all the empty bottles.
I say, yeah, I didn't really like them.
Could you replace them with...
The same ones are fine.
I'll try them again.
Discover great wine today.
Go to trywink, W-I-N-C dot com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Trywink.com slash Knowles.
That's how you should do it.
Everything in moderation.
I'm not saying we should be abstinent from all of the fun little chemicals in this world.
Especially the ones that have been around for all of human civilization.
But you should do it in connoisseurship and you should do it not to excess.
So life is too short to drink bad wine.
Make sure you drink good wine.
Back to the antidepressants.
25 million Americans have been on antidepressants for at least two years.
That is a 60% increase in the last eight years.
60.
6-0.
15.5 million Americans have been on them for at least five years.
That is a huge...
That is...
5% of the country have been on these drugs for at least 5 years, in some cases much longer.
That number has doubled since 2010, and that number has tripled since 2000.
The growth rate is shockingly high.
In Britain, antidepressant prescription rates have also doubled in the past decade, and something that no one really seemed to give much care about when they were prescribing all of these drugs to all of America is withdrawal.
It just hasn't really been studied.
It hasn't been sufficiently studied.
You think if you give people a ton of happy pills that if they go off them, you might have some adverse side effects.
Now we're just beginning to see that.
In New Zealand, three-quarters of long-term users of these antidepressant drugs reported difficult withdrawal symptoms.
Half of long-term users of psychiatric drugs in the U.S. who were able to quit said that the withdrawal was severe.
Those are just the people who were able to quit.
And that's half of them.
Half of the people who tried to quit could not quit because the withdrawal was so severe.
We have this image in our head of the heroin addict, you know, shaking from withdrawal symptoms.
But withdrawal has been very severe even on what we think or just, oh, my doctor gave it to me.
My doctor wrote me a prescription for this.
So severe that half of the people couldn't quit.
Antidepressants originally were a short-term treatment for mood swings.
They'd be prescribed for six to nine months.
Or if there were some traumatic event, they'd be prescribed and they'd kind of get you through the event.
Who knows about the wisdom of that?
But they were not broadly considered to be these permanent solutions.
Consider some of these other numbers.
White women over 45 Those people account for just 20% of the U.S. population.
They account for 40% of users of antidepressant pills.
Those same white women account for 58% of long-term antidepressant users, not just six to nine months, but longer term.
We have to ask ourselves, what's wrong with middle-aged white women?
Why are their lives so hard and terrible that they're taking all these pills?
Now, there is an objection here.
I should be clear.
I'm not telling anybody to stop their medication.
Talk to your doctors.
Talk to your psychiatrists.
There is such a thing as clinical depression.
There is such a thing as serious physical problems.
I'm not saying get off your happy pills, but it seems quite clear from the numbers that these are being vastly over prescribed.
And there might be other explanations for this.
The one objection, you say, okay, well, everybody's on these happy pills now, but maybe that's a good thing.
Maybe that's a good thing.
Maybe it's helping people not be depressed or help them live better lives or whatever.
Except that doesn't hold up because there isn't just a drug epidemic.
It's not just antidepressants or pot or booze or opioids or whatever.
It's not just that.
There's an epidemic of suicide as well.
Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States.
Deaths from suicide are up almost a full quarter.
They're up 24% between 1999 and 2014.
That's just suicide writ large.
The biggest uptick, as always, is among middle-aged men because suicide is mostly a problem for white males.
White middle-aged males constitute the lion's share of suicide victims.
But there's also now a major uptick in young women.
A major uptick for women who are between 10 and 14 years old.
From 1999 to 2014, there was a 200% increase in suicide.
200%.
White women had a 60% increase in suicide over that time period, over that 15-year period.
And the vast majority, 83% of women who commit suicide are white.
This is a problem of middle-aged white women, you could say.
So it looks like the antidepressants aren't working.
The demographics taking the antidepressants at the highly increased rates are the same ones that are killing themselves at very increased rates.
Obviously something isn't working.
What's the problem?
What is wrong with all of these demographics, but particularly these women who are killing themselves at increased rates and taking antidepressant drugs at increased rates?
It seems to me the problem here is philosophical, not psychological.
Marx said, Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses or religion is the opium of the people.
The full quote is longer than that.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people.
Religion might be the opium of the people, but when religion isn't the opium of the people, opium is the opium of the people.
That's what we're seeing.
That's what we're seeing around us right now.
We're seeing it with antidepressants, we're seeing it with booze, we're seeing it with pot, and we're seeing it literally with opium and opiates again.
Why is that?
Marx is mocking religion.
He's saying this is just a crutch for a heartless world, a soulless world.
But what if the world isn't heartless?
What if it isn't soulless?
What if the world does have heart?
What if you can take heart?
What if the world does have a soul?
What if you have a soul?
The issue here is the problem of suffering.
Suffering isn't going to go away.
Communism tried to fix suffering.
It tried to perfect human nature.
It tried to eliminate this problem of evil and this problem of suffering from reality.
And what did it do?
God knows how many fold.
It increased it incredibly.
It was the bloodiest century in history.
Until the modern era, people understood this.
They accepted suffering.
That there is a purpose to life and there is such a thing as virtue and suffering in here is in life.
You see this in all of the ancients.
You see this in the medievals.
You see this all the way up to the modern era.
And then now we have to wonder, well, how do we get rid of suffering?
I don't want suffering.
That doesn't make sense.
There's no purpose to life.
It's just, you know, we're all just molecules floating around and consciousness is an illusion and free will is an illusion and my soul is an illusion and virtue is an illusion.
There's no such thing as morality.
It's just kind of been constructed over time by our random genetic forces and virtue, that is certainly an illusion.
If you think that you're meat, you're going to treat yourself like meat.
If you think you're just a physical object, you're just going to treat yourself like a physical object.
And so we have this trouble because people realize they can pretend that they're meat.
They can pretend that there's no soul and there's no spiritual aspect of life, but they still suffer.
But suffering isn't physical.
We know suffering is not physical.
Other than in very, very rare cases and for periods of time, Suffering is also a spiritual condition.
We feel that.
And so our first reaction is to just pop some pills.
If I'm physical and there's something wrong with the physical, the solution has to be physical.
It can't be philosophical.
It has to be psychological.
If you know that you're spirit, you'll treat yourself like spirit.
If you know that there's a purpose to life and you know that there are virtues and you know that there are external virtues and internal virtues and that there are goods to be acquired in the outside world and there are goods in yourself, integrity in yourself, goods in the doing of the thing, Then you will treat yourself that way and you will have a better life.
And life will be much better.
And it will seem rosier.
And it won't seem like a heartless world.
And it won't seem like a soulless world.
You'll realize that there is heart and soul and purpose.
It would dramatically reduce this problem.
We have a lot more people taking antidepressants.
We have a lot more people killing themselves anyway.
That is a philosophical problem.
There isn't something physical that's just changed in the last 15 years.
What has changed is our view of the world and our view of ourselves.
And we've been deluded by a bunch of halfwits and middle-brow pseudo-intellectuals who tell us there's no such thing as God.
There is such a thing as God.
And I want to be the middle-brow intellectual to tell you that.
I want to be the middle-brow pseudo-intellectual to let you know that because it's ridiculous.
That fad is finally passing among literary and intellectual and publishing circles, and I hope it passes in the popular culture as well because we're seeing the wake of that awful spiritual and literary and philosophical phenomenon.
Winston Churchill had a great line on this question.
He said, We learn that we are spirits,
not animals, and that something is going on in space and time and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.
Spells duty, purpose, a reason to be here, something that you have to do.
There's a question of why the lion's share of these antidepressant takers are middle-aged white women.
And I suspect that it might have something to do with the leisure afforded to that demographic, among other demographics.
There is a sense of hopelessness if one doesn't realize that there's a purpose to life.
If one doesn't realize that there is a hope and that you're here for a reason.
And it isn't just about making money.
It isn't just about having a lot of people who stay home and raise their kids.
They can't really go back to the workforce and make a lot of money.
So they might feel hopeless there.
Women of a certain age sometimes aren't the most sensual as they once were.
And so you might say, oh, what purpose is that there?
They're not raising kids anymore.
A lot of the kids are out of the house at that point.
They said, what is my purpose?
What am I here for?
I've checked all of the boxes that I was supposed to do, and there's no God and there's no soul and there's no purpose.
So I'm just, I'm just, I'm just here.
But that isn't the case.
That's a delusion.
And until people write that philosophical problem...
They're not going to be able to write the psychological problem.
I'll tie this back to Teddy Kennedy, because I don't want to let this whole show go by without insulting Teddy Kennedy.
But it does tie in a little bit, which is that I saw the movie Chappaquiddick over the weekend.
It's excellent.
Go see it.
It's absolutely honest in its portrayal.
It's made by lefty filmmakers.
It's not made by conservatives.
Nevertheless, it's pretty brutal.
I explain why I think it was able to be made at this point.
I explained that on Drew's show today, so you can go over there.
I also wrote a review about it on The Daily Wire.
What I want to focus on is the person of Teddy Kennedy himself, because this movie is really the first time that the popular culture has admitted that Teddy Kennedy was just an absolute degenerate.
He was a womanizing, cheating, lying, dishonest, manslaughtering drunk who didn't really take any responsibility for his life and just grifted on the public dime and the public attention for his entire life.
And just an absolute derelict.
And when he retired from the Senate, or I'm sorry, when he died, they called him the lion of the Senate.
That's what the Democrats said.
He's the lion of the Senate.
He's this great man.
They wouldn't talk about it.
Andrea Mitchell said that the heavens were weeping for Teddy Kennedy.
Now we're getting the real story.
And it's interesting to look at him because the Kennedys so debased American politics.
They stole the 1960 election.
They were just...
The things that JFK did with his interns all around the White House and appointing, you know, all of these questionable people to positions.
And Ted Kennedy, obviously, he didn't have the integrity to resign after he killed that poor girl.
He kept going.
He played the victim.
He wore a bogus neck brace.
And yet people saw him turning his neck.
So it was all...
All just about him.
Me, me, me.
How do I rise to power?
Teddy Kennedy, as a public figure, was a man without virtue.
He didn't practice the virtues.
He wasn't temperate.
He wasn't just.
He just didn't have them.
He was cowardly.
He just did not exhibit any integrity.
and that has fed through all the way up through Clinton and into the present political situation where you see politicians on both sides of the aisle being a little bit more open and a little bit more craven about that.
That's the world without virtue.
That's the world where we're just all meat and we're all just in it to win for ourselves.
And I don't know, maybe it's providential timing.
Hopefully this can be a turning point.
We say, oh, I don't really like that.
We carried water for that big, fat, drunken, lecherous lout for 50 years.
And maybe we should stop that.
What would happen if we don't do that?
What if we don't pretend that Teddy Kennedy is anything better than a degenerate?
Maybe we could get people who are generates.
It's...
People are actually decent people with integrity or more integrity.
That's some hope to leave it on, but the question is virtue, and that's, I think, at the heart of all of this.
All right, we've got to talk a little bit about comedy, but I've got to think about Facebook and YouTube, don't I? Terrible.
We've got to talk to an excellent guest coming up, Frank.
And before we do that, it is here, our next episode of The Conversation.
That episode will be tomorrow, April 10th at 5.30 Eastern, 2.30 Pacific.
If you haven't already joined The Conversation series, it is our monthly Q&A hosted by Alicia Krause, where we answer any and all questions from politics to the personal.
And you know, I'm a feminist man, so the politics is the personal.
features our very own Andrew Klavan.
It will stream live on The Daily Wire's Facebook and YouTube pages.
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To ask questions as a subscriber, log into our website, dailywire.com, head over to the conversation page to watch the live stream.
After that, just start typing into The Daily Wire chat box, where Drew will answer questions as they come in for an entire hour.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by Andrew Klavan on Tuesday, April 10th at 5:30 p.m.
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Here it is.
I gotta tell you, I barely got out of that movie theater alive when I saw Chappaquiddick.
I went in there, I thought, oh, this will just be some lefty film and they'll make them look nice.
Thankfully, I carried a life raft with me so I could sail out on the salty and delicious leftist tears that filled the entire theater.
I should have just brought my leftist tears tumbler.
This is the only FDA-approved device and vessel for those salty, delicious leftist tears.
Go to dailywire.com right now.
We'll be right back.
All right.
I want to bring on Frank J. Fleming now, finally, author of SideQuest, In Realms Ungoogled.
Frank, thank you for being here.
Hey, thanks for having me.
So, Frank, this book, it's a comic fantasy.
It's a fantasy that's very funny, and I really haven't read anything like it before, but I really enjoyed it.
How would you describe it?
Well, it's about a mild-mannered computer programmer who, on Twitter, One day on his way to work, goes on a trail.
He's always seen before but never really bothered to go down just a road off his usual way to work.
And he's given a sword by fairies, which seems kind of unusual.
And then he starts to notice things like his boss is a demon.
They sacrifice people beneath his office building.
And his girlfriend works for an evil entity and raids villages at night.
And he thinks all this is kind of odd, but he's the only one.
It's just business as usual.
One thing that really drew my attention to it is I did this show with Andrew Klavan called Another Kingdom, where it's another conservative satirist who's writing about fairies and this magical land.
I don't know what it is about us conservatives writing about fairies, but there's something deeply Freudian probably back there.
You write a lot of conservative satire.
I love conservative satire.
I'm a longtime fan of P.J. O'Rourke.
I remember in college I would read, he wrote an excellent essay called, Republican Party Reptile, How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.
That was the name of an important political essay in my upbringing.
You do it yourself.
You're a practitioner.
What do you think about the state of political satire in the age of Trump?
It's absolutely dead.
It's dead, because we're beyond satire, aren't we?
Well, I mean, I try to come up with something like, hey, what's something ridiculous?
And then Trump tops me.
And then like, oh, what's like the most ridiculous response to that?
And then the left tops me.
And it's just, I don't have the imagination for it anymore.
It just seems like, you know, I just can't beat reality.
This is how I feel about the conservative, or what I think is probably a secret crypto conservative website, but it's my favorite website on the internet, Everyday Feminism.
It is so good, it has reached the point where you cannot tell if it is satire or earnest.
And at that point, one has to sort of throw up one's hands and say, oh well, that's too much.
The thing about Trump that I love, though, is...
In the age of Bush, when George W. Bush wouldn't strike back, he was very dignified, Jon Stewart had a ball.
Stephen Colbert, the same thing.
They were able to be very satirical, Because they were playing off a straight man.
Now, Donald Trump is funnier than any of them.
He is a better stage comedian than any of those satirists, so you just have Jimmy Kimmel crying instead.
Conservatives right now, they seem to be the funny ones.
We're the ones laughing, we're on the internet, you know, with the memes and everything.
The left is so unfunny.
They're like Sandra Fluke, that meme, you know, of the abortion, or the contraception activist.
She's like, arms folded, and that's not funny, wah, wah, wah.
Oh, Why is that?
Why are conservatives the funny ones right now?
Why is the left so unfunny?
Well, I think a few like me, I'm one of those who just completely detached after 2016.
I mean, that was an interesting election.
It was a tough one because you had, you know, it was like choosing between prime rib and lobster.
I mean, it's just like, how can I pick just one?
Please give me both.
Yeah, yeah.
It was like you just froze there looking for the both option.
You know, I don't know if Combine them like Hillary and Trump, like a Hilarump or a Trump-ly, but...
A Hilarump, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's like, oh, I guess things are great now.
We're not needed anymore.
And so I just kind of detached a bit.
And when you detach and you don't take it so seriously, I mean, this has been like the most entertaining presidency ever.
It's just, it's constant amusement.
I mean, you're on Twitter.
He's always on there keeping things interesting.
And it's, you know...
It's pretty nice.
It's a lot of fun, but everybody's just getting so worked up about it.
It's like that Andy Kaufman thing, but they're not in on the joke.
They're all yelling at him.
I think this is actually the reason.
I think you've hit on exactly why conservatives are the funny ones right now, and the left is so unfunny, is that conservatives have other things, you know?
Conservatives have other things going on, so politics isn't the end of the world for us.
Tax rates go up, tax rates go down, sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse.
Not in that order.
And, you know, it's...
The government is always a nuisance.
Politics is always going to try to encroach on us.
But, you know, we have culture.
We have God above the culture.
And there are other things.
We have our families and that sort of thing.
But for the left, the political is the personal.
And it's just they worship it like it's a religion.
And who cares, you know?
Put not your faith in princes.
If you live your life just only caring about what's happening in politics, you're going to be very disappointed, I think.
Yeah, that's the problem with true conservatives.
They have way more important things to worry about than politics.
So it's like they're the ones who are going to check out when everybody else is putting all their energy into it.
They have other things to do.
I've got kids to get to t-ball and stuff.
I can't be freaking out about this.
I like to read a good book in the morning and not get worked up by the news.
Now, this actually does bring me to a serious question about you and your audience.
Conservatives, as you know, are Philistines.
Even I, I don't really read novels.
Hardly ever.
I don't read a ton of fiction.
How are you finding the book is being received?
I really enjoy it.
When someone puts a book in front of me, or they say, I think you'll like this, Michael.
This kind of has similar themes that you like.
I read it.
It's really fun to read.
How is the response?
Well, it's a little tougher marketing a novel than I thought.
This is only my second one.
And, you know, if you go to Amazon, there's got to be, I don't know, dozens of different novels to choose from, and you've got to convince people to buy yours.
See, I think they have almost 10 novels on Amazon now.
Yeah, yeah.
Some of them are Harry Potter.
But, you know, and then, let's see, the average person reads maybe one book every decade, and so I've got to convince them to read mine over one of the Harry Potters, which, you know, it's tough.
I don't have, you know, Harry...
Ron, Hermione, and mine.
If you put that hot little English tomato in your series, then maybe you'll be able to do it.
But yeah, so I just try to make it fun.
It's got some of the pop culture references, which are big in that Ready Player One thing, but it's got a few other things than just pop culture references, so it's actually like a story.
I really like it because I have to read a lot.
That's basically the only requirement of this job, is you have to read a lot.
Before bed, I'll be reading some moral philosophy or something.
I'm reading Alistair MacIntyre, whom I really like, and you get four syllables in, and then it's eight in the morning.
You know, then you get four syllables and you're just dead to the world.
But this is really fun.
This kept me up.
And so I definitely recommend going out and getting it.
The book is SideQuest in Realms Ungoogled.
The author is Frank J. Fleming.
Frank, thank you for being here.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Try to say that five times fast.
Frank J. Fleming.
Frank J. Fleming.
Go get it.
Good book.
SideQuest in Realms ungoogled.
Okay, that's our show for the day.
We have much more to talk about, but we're out of time.
Sorry, folks.
Go over to Daily Wire.
Get your mailbag questions in.
I'm going to start.
They're going to be percolating.
And then I'm going to be on the road coming up soon, I think next week.
So I'll give some more details on that when they come out.
But I'm going to be in Mobile, Alabama.
I believe it's April 17th.
To visit the Alabama Policy Institute and give a talk there.
So if you are so inclined and you're in the area, you're hanging around Mobile, go over there and I think tickets are still available on the Alabama Policy Institute website.
Okay, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
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.
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