Ep. 148 - What I Saw In Baghwan’s Sex Cult ft. Bridget Phetasy
Today’s show will be all about sex, hedonism, and free love because I’ve got a month left of bachelorhood and I need tips on how to live it up. Speaking of hippie communes, today is May Day, which is celebrated by pagans and communists alike. Lucky for us, in the United States, we celebrate a very different holiday today, which we’ll get to in This Day In History. Finally, on cults and culture, new studies reveal an epidemic of hatred and loneliness in America.
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Today's show will be all about sex, hedonism, and free love, because I've got a month left of bachelorhood and I need tips on how to really live it up.
And speaking of hippie communes, today is May Day, which is celebrated by pagans and communists alike.
Lucky for us in the United States, we celebrate a very different holiday today, which we'll get to in this day in history.
Finally, on cults and culture, new studies reveal an epidemic of hatred and loneliness in America.
But first, we have Bridget Phetasy in studio, writes for The Federalist and Playboy, and spent time in the very sex cult featured in Wild Wild Country.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
A lot to get to today.
Sex, communes, cults, bad culture, why Americans are lonely and they hate each other.
We have a little bit of hope at the end, but I want to get straight to the sex.
So let's very quickly, you know, speaking of, these two sort of relate.
I won't go too into it.
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If you haven't seen this, I think this is the biggest show on Netflix right now, Wild Wild Country.
It's about the Rajneeshi cult that was in Oregon, and they took over a city, basically, and they all wore orange or red and had a lot of sex and followed this crazy Indian guy.
If you haven't seen it, here's just a little bit of the trailer.
Everybody felt they were there at the beginning of the great experiment, like we were the chosen people.
A prominent Indian guru and his followers bought it.
Bhagwan's agenda was simply to raise the consciousness of humanity.
That was his goal.
They're run by satanic power.
There is talk of vigilantes who may seek revenge on the Rajneeshis.
If I didn't take measures to protect our community, no one else would do it.
We call upon the governor to disarm this cult's army now.
Who would poison a whole town?
The Rajneeshis.
They were facing immigration fraud, smuggling.
The Rajneeshis came this close to murdering a presidential appointee.
There's darkness in all of us.
It doesn't make you a bad person.
That menacing laugh at the end.
That is the Rajneeshi cult.
And coincidentally, you might have seen Bridget Phetasy.
You might have read her writing on The Federalist or Playboy.com, which I only read for the articles.
You might have seen her there.
I think Bridget is actually the only person that writes for both The Federalist and Playboy.com.
Before her, it was just Bill Buckley.
Coincidentally, Bridget actually spent about a month On a Rajneeshi sex cult in Australia.
Not the one in Oregon, but they have these all over the world, and she spent it on one in Australia.
We're joined right now by Bridget Phetasy.
Bridget, thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me.
It's my wheelhouse.
I love your writing.
Thank you.
Coincidentally, you happen to experience probably the biggest TV phenomenon in person, up close, maybe up a little too close.
I didn't think I would ask this question on The Michael Knowles Show.
What made you join a sex cult?
It was an accident.
That's what they all say, Bridget, you know.
It was an accident for a month.
I was traveling.
I had booked a one-way ticket and just wanted to put a backpack on and travel.
And I went with this guy that I met in Sydney.
We went up to the coast and it was their holidays and he assured me that there would be a place to stay in Byron Bay.
And I got there and there was nowhere to stay and he was having a boys weekend so he, being not a gentleman, was basically like, you're on your own, girl, I just met.
Bridget, I don't know if that's just being not a gentleman.
If I'm not a gentleman, maybe I don't pick up the tab at dinner or something.
But I've never ditched my date for a sex cult.
And so I ended up looking on Woofing.
I subscribed to all these different sites like Couchsurfing and Woofing.
And I looked on Woofing and they had an ad for...
It was just like a spiritual retreat is what they called it.
And Woofing is...
That's the organic...
Woofing is worldwide organic farming.
If you're traveling on a budget, it's a great way to go around and you work four hours a day for somebody on a farm and then you can go do whatever you want.
It's a good way to get around the world in places like Chile and New Zealand in particular and Australia.
And then I was like, oh, a spiritual retreat.
That sounds harmless enough.
And I went and they said, oh, there's a car in town right now getting supplies.
We can pick you up today.
And I said, perfect.
And then they showed up and they were all in white with beads and crazy eyes.
Did they all have crazy eyes?
They definitely had that, like, the look, where it's just, I don't know if it is just the brainwashing that happens, that your eyes, it's like disconnected a little bit.
And they showed up and I got in the car and, you know, at some point, I'm, I have a Very storied past.
And I sometimes do things...
I'm a writer.
And sometimes I make decisions because I'm like, oh, this will be a cool story.
And who knows?
But then I realize, you know, I'm taking my life in my own hands.
Right.
And it might be dangerous.
And I ended up in the car and the guy was driving like a maniac really aggressively through all these windy back roads.
And I was like, wow, I might never see my family or friends again.
I could just disappear.
Yeah.
No one knew where I was.
I mean, it was reckless.
You're in the middle of Australia.
And you don't have communication tools, right?
Not really.
I had, you know, a little, like, flip phone that I bought when I started traveling.
But it wasn't, you know, this was before.
I don't even think Airbnb was a thing yet.
It wasn't too long ago.
It was 2012.
But it wasn't like it is now.
Now, you get there, because I've seen the show.
The show is really good, Wild Wild Country.
You can check it out.
How similar is it?
What is this, the Australian version, like?
It was pretty similar.
It wasn't...
I mean, the scenes that you see that are really graphic...
It was funny, because I walked into the living room, and my roommate was watching it.
And I was like, hey, I've done that!
And it was them doing the dynamic meditation...
And she was like, of course you have, Bridget.
What are you talking about?
This is a documentary.
And I was like, no, I was on an ashram that did all this stuff.
What is this?
And then she was telling me, like, oh, yeah, this is the guy who started...
He's the guy that had the whole...
It was the whatever, what we practiced on the ashram.
Yeah.
We listened to his tapes, and we did the dynamic meditation, which is a meditation that he invented.
And it's...
It wasn't like as raw and aggressive and naked and kind of crazy.
I didn't want to pry, but yeah, I wanted to know, on all of these other ashrams that are still in existence today, are they all having weird, bizarre sitar music tantric sex?
Um...
Yes and no.
So, most ashrams...
Osho kind of...
He rejected the traditional ashram...
He said it's not all about just denial.
It's about embracing.
He had this whole thing called Zorba the Buddha, where you can meditate, but you can also drink and be wild and crazy and have sex.
And you don't have to renounce all these things to be spiritual.
In fact, spirituality and sexuality are linked.
You can't really untangle them.
And encouraged polyamory and all of this kind of partner swapping.
And...
Yeah, I think that most ashrams that you go to come from a strict lineage.
I went to another one in New Zealand and it was, you know, the golden silence from 8 until 8 and kirtan in the morning, but it was with meditation and it was very strict and it was the complete opposite.
So I think the Osho ashrams are their own little culture.
Now, who is running this thing in Australia?
So it's not the Bhagwan Indian guy that lived in Oregon.
Who's the guy in Australia?
It was a guy named Samaya, but it was...
I think he was an Italian trust fund baby.
Of course he was.
That's what I've come to find out.
Of course he was.
He was Italian.
Note to self.
When Ben fires you...
Yeah, okay.
Go start a call.
Uh-huh.
It seems like a pretty good gig to have.
Seriously.
I like how you can kind of just go retreat and then come and everyone's like, oh, yay.
But most of the time you just kind of spend alone.
I think he just watched...
I don't know what he was doing all that time alone.
Nice work if you can get it.
The Bhagwan spent a lot of time alone, it seems like.
He was isolated a lot.
Did you...
So I'm wondering how this Italian guy did it.
Is there a brainwashing that goes on?
Yes.
It's insidious and subtle, and it's...
It's not...
My brain is kind of wash-resistant, I think.
I had a lot of experiences leading up to that that made me very skeptical of anybody using sexuality to be spiritual, which we won't get into.
That's for after the break.
That's for the subscribers only.
I had an immunity to that kind of tactic.
But I can see how you get broken down.
It's really erratic.
The exercises that Osho had you do, or in this case at this ashram, our guru, you vacillate between emotions really rapidly.
So if you and I were doing an exercise, first it's like gibberish, and then they ding a bell, and then you start laughing like a crazy person, like...
That sounds like acting class.
It is like acting class.
I'm making a joke, but that is true.
They do this in acting classes.
This is another one of the immunities I had.
I was like, oh, this is improv.
I can do this.
But then it dings a bell, and then you start screaming at each other and being like, F you!
And you see that on the thing.
And it makes you crazy.
It definitely destabilizes your emotional center.
Sounds like it explains every actor that I've ever met.
It does remind me too.
You're describing LA. Yeah, that's right.
You didn't have to go to Australia.
LA is a weird sex cult, isn't it?
It is.
I think so.
And there's so many cults in LA. There are.
I mean, I actually know people who have joined cults in LA. I mean, Scientology, eh?
The biggest one in the world.
The biggest one.
But there's one of the other, another investigative piece that I did was on orgasmic meditation.
And as I did the piece, and everybody kind of, any journalist who had written about it kind of drank the Kool-Aid.
And I was like, am I the only one who thinks this is kind of weird?
And I went, and my therapist was like, be careful, Bridget, with your history.
Like, this can be kind of triggering.
Just be careful.
And They didn't do...
I was calling it Diddle Club because...
Am I allowed to talk about this?
Do we?
I don't know if we have to blank out Diddle Club.
We'll see.
We'll fix it in post.
I'm like, am I allowed to say Diddle Club?
And yeah, it's a whole thing about being in the om of the...
After I wrote the piece, I got emails from therapists up in San Francisco, which is where this thing started, of course.
And they were saying that they were so glad that I was critical of it because they have clients who are suffering and nobody...
I mean, there really should be a full-blown investigative report about this situation.
It sounds exhausting.
Orgasmic meditation, sex-austing, if you will, but that's very tiring.
How do you keep that up all day?
I was out after the first intro.
I'm going to avoid making all of the jokes, because it's a family show, but there's a lot to say.
This reminds me of the famous triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, where, you know, it's a famous triptych where it's paradise and it's beautiful and then everyone's kind of having these sensual pleasures and then it is hell on earth at the end.
It is just pure revelation, hell, you know.
You write in your piece about this, excellent piece at Mel Magazine, you write, were we just hedonists following our bliss or was there something evil lurking behind it all?
Which is it and what's the difference?
Well, I think the road to hell.
Anything can be perverted.
I think you can go in with good intentions of being spiritual and wanting to connect to something higher.
And I think that's why so many people end up in India or on these pilgrimages or in ashrams.
You're not living the dream and like, okay, I'm going to go check out and...
Just go off the grid.
I think there's an internal sense of restlessness or longing for a feeling of connection to something bigger.
So it would be very easy to manipulate that for money or power or prestige or any of these things.
And I think that you find these people In myself, I can only speak for myself, I kind of turned the other cheek to a lot of the stuff that was going on because I was just enjoying myself and ultimately on holiday and knew I was leaving.
There were moments where I didn't want to leave because it was nice being...
There is something very natural about living that way.
It's quite simple.
So simple.
You have no decisions to make because some swarthy little Indian millionaire makes them for you.
Yes.
And it's a, there's a nice routine and you're not wasting, you know, sometimes I'll like be pumping gas or I'll be, I'll be throwing a Starbucks cup away and I'm like, this isn't sustainable.
You know, there's this, this, I'll go into Costco and it's like everything in here is going to end up in a landfill or like coming, you know, how is this sustainable?
That's how I meditate actually is I just pour fossil fuels on the ground and I think, ah, now I'm at peace.
Ohm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
So there is something kind of, it's like a bit of a relief.
I found that it was a relief.
Although I missed all of those earthly pleasures.
And I wonder, because you write about this in the Mel piece, you say that you missed civilization.
Yeah.
You really liked the kind of simple sensuality, spirituality, farming or whatever, but that you also missed civilization.
Like booze and opera and drugs and nice food and meat and steak.
You eventually come back to civilization.
In your line about hedonism, is it just the natural end of hedonism?
Is this cultishness?
It gives itself over to cultishness?
And what is that boundary like?
I think it does.
I don't know where you go.
I don't know where you end up at the end of hedonism other than searching for something.
Because it is so...
I know where you go.
It's all LA. Yeah, it's true.
You come to LA. You come to LA. Well, you're already here, and all of these cults pop up in the most hedonistic cities in America.
And I think it's because there are all these people in LA, and you'll say, yeah, well, I'm a Catholic.
Say, oh, you believe in that crazy superstition?
That's ridiculous.
Hold on, I just have to move around my chakras because Mercury's in retrograde.
I can't believe you believe in that crazy Catholic church.
And often it's the people who are not religious, who are very hedonistic.
They're the most superstitious people on earth.
Oh, I mean, I feel this way about atheism, even.
It's the dogma of atheism.
You guys really spend a lot of time telling me, preaching your atheistic values.
It feels the same way to me.
I think we all want something to believe as humans because it's very confusing being human.
And I don't know much.
I'm not that smart.
I do know a lot about the human condition from my own experience.
And the human condition, I think, is very confusing because there's this sense of order.
The sun rises, it sets.
There are seasons.
And yet there's all this chaos.
And so that chaos, you want to make it make sense.
That is the essential.
I mean, Jordan Peterson just sold a gazillion books on this.
The essential human motive is to make order out of chaos and to pursue the good, to pursue the virtue.
So I wonder, you know, culture and cult come from the same word, to cultivate, right?
They're both derived from the same thing.
Which is worse, a wacky Indian sex cult in Australia or our modern, decadent, materialistic culture broadly in the West?
Ooh.
It's interesting because there isn't much difference from the experience I had at that ashram and working up on a farm in Oregon.
There's a lot of overlap, the polyamorous, and even in L.A., the culture here.
And it leads, which is worse, wacky.
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, from what I've tasted of desire.
You know, there are a lot of...
Everyone's being exploited.
So whether you're exploited for your breath work down here, or you're exploited for money on this ashram, or you're...
Your psychology is—I think the dangerous thing that happens in places like ashrams, as opposed to being in civilization, is that your brain breaks in those places.
And I definitely had friends that I'm still in touch with whose brains are a little bit broken from the ashram.
They can't really exist in civilization, and they don't really have a desire to because they haven't—they lost their— That socialization.
They're incapable of, like, the noise is too much, and the chaos, and the capitalism.
Well, you talk about it explicitly in one moment in the piece.
You say they tried to give you a new name.
They did.
And that's the moment where you thought, this is getting pretty weird, fellas.
I hope that's what my name is here.
Prem Sarita, guys.
Prem Sarita, yes, of course, Premi.
River of love.
Yeah.
The river of love.
They gave you this new name.
This is just a cynical tactic to break your individuality.
And they do a lot of that.
And I do think that that, I guess, again, one of the differences, it's targeted breaking in an ashram, whereas here, maybe it's more insidious.
Like, L.A. just wears you down slowly in traffic and just battling everything.
Broken dreams, absolutely unsatisfied.
Anyway, I'm sorry, I don't know what we're talking about.
Yeah.
But there it's very much forget who you are.
The outside world doesn't matter.
You're going to disconnect from your family.
They don't need to hear from you.
You're isolated.
So there's a big difference between any situation, whether it's Scientology or the ashram or anything where it's isolating you from your friends and family and people that love you and know you.
You see it in relationships.
Right.
I mean, Drew and I were joking.
He's like, can't I just be a cult of one?
And I was like, I think that's marriage.
Yeah, you're in it.
You're the Bogwan.
I always refer to Drew Klavan as the Bogwan.
Isn't that just what marriage is, like a cult of two?
Wow, you've really taken me full circle here, Bridget.
Initially, I just wanted to dive into a weird, sexy, sitar-laden ashram, but now you've really...
I can be my own Italian cult leader.
I don't need to go to Australia to do that.
I'll do it right in my own marriage.
You can do it right in your own house.
There's so much more I want to talk to you about, but we have to move on.
I've got to get out of here.
I want to talk to you.
Oh, there's so much.
Okay, we'll just have to have you back.
Okay.
Bridget.
Thank you so much.
Premi.
Premi, thank you for being here.
Where can people find you?
Oh, Twitter is the best.
I'm on all the socials, but at Bridget Phetasy is where I live on Twitter.
At Bridget Phetasy.
Don't we all?
I know.
I want to throw it and go follow the bog run.
I took it off my phone, though.
That's a good first step.
I recommend it.
That's a good first step.
Now that I have this mug, I will never be working in Hollywood again.
You're done.
I've been Kanye'd.
You've been Kanye'd.
The Crips are going to put a hit out on you, actually.
That's what happens.
You're not going to believe the Crips, man.
I was Kanye'd long before Kanye.
Wow.
Well, hopefully you'll be able to get some good Trump tweets out of that.
Hopefully you can avoid the Crips in the meantime.
Bridget Phetasy.
Go find her on Twitter and read all of her stuff.
At The Federalist or, you know, Playboy's not a bad website to visit every once in a while.
Or Mel Magazine is great.
Mel Magazine writes everywhere.
And, all right, we'll see you soon.
Thank you so much.
Bridget.
Okay, we've got to get and talk a little bit about the culture.
Because, you know, we're talking about weird sex cults and now we can talk about our weird culture, which is absolutely in the gutter.
There's some sad news that I want to get to about the culture today before we sign off and get to this day in history.
Sad news about the culture is that we all hate each other.
The Pew Research Center just has a report out from last fall.
It's being reported on now.
The report shows, quote, among members of both parties, the shares with very unfavorable opinions of the other party have more than doubled.
They've increased by 28 full percentage points since 1994.
Republicans and Democrats don't want to live in the same types of communities anymore.
Most of them admit they have very few or no friends on the other side of the aisle.
This is pretty weird.
This is weird.
And I've noticed it even in my brief stint on this earth.
The politics has gotten much nastier.
And now, if I go to a dinner or something, and I say, oh, I'm...
I'm Catholic or I don't know, I'm this or I have this belief or this belief.
That is much more acceptable than saying I'm a Republican or I voted for Donald Trump.
That you cannot say.
It's very awkward.
You have to hide it.
You saw this in voting patterns.
This is why the polls weren't always so right, public opinion polls about Trump support, because 20% of people don't want to admit it.
18% of people, I think also, no, according to a national survey in Selena Zito's new book, show that people who voted for Donald Trump I don't want to admit it to others because they fear being ostracized.
They fear losing their jobs or their reputations or their careers or friends or whatever.
We know that lefties on Facebook are three times more likely than conservatives to unfriend people because of their political views.
It's really angry and bitter.
And I think it's because the culture's gotten shallower.
So everything is just shouting and yelling.
And I don't blame the two sides equally for this.
There's this really kumbaya thing.
We say, you know, it's both sides, man.
No, it actually is being driven by the left.
And conservatives sometimes take their cues or take the bait, but this is being driven by the left.
It's being driven by poisonous ideologies like intersectionality, which say, hey, forget about our ideas, forget about our reason.
We're going to gang up on this demographic because we don't like this group of people.
It's a really wicked ideology.
And also, you see it in Jonathan Haidt's studies.
Jonathan Haidt published that famous study a few years ago.
It was reported on the New York Times that conservatives understand the left, more or less, but the left doesn't understand conservatives.
They view the world in only three value categories.
These things are all a little malleable, but the left views the world in narrower value categories and fewer value categories than conservatives view the world.
So we can understand that point of view, but for instance, the left has trouble understanding something like purity, the conservative value of purity.
They say, who cares about purity?
What are you talking about, man?
I just want to live on my sex cult for my whole life or something like that.
That's too bad.
Usually the loudest voices are the least knowledgeable.
That tends to be the case.
And you hear people say, they say, I'm going to shout my abortion.
I'm so proud.
I'm going to shout this or shout that.
You know, that girl, when Donald Trump won, there was that video of her and she's out there.
They say, Donald Trump won the election.
She goes, no!
And she yells and she screams because there's no reasonable discourse.
If you get angry and hot all the time and you want to unfriend people and scream and yell, Usually that's a sign that you don't understand what you're talking about.
Because I hear all sorts of crazy ideas all day long.
I usually don't get that flustered because I've heard them before.
That owes to a bad education system.
That owes to a highly politicized education system.
And a vicious, shallow, highly politicized pop culture.
Hopefully that's turning around.
Bridget mentioned that she got Kanye'd.
Bridget isn't some Edmund Burke-ian conservative with buttoned up wearing tweed all the time, certainly not on the ashram, but she got Kanye'd in that she's a free thinker, and these days if you're a free thinker, if you have independent thought, that puts you on the right.
I don't think people signed up for that, but the left has moved so far to the left, it just puts you on the right.
This ties in with another sad phenomenon that's happening in the culture, and that's loneliness.
There's an epidemic right now of loneliness in the culture.
A new study from Cigna reveals that loneliness is at epidemic levels in America.
This was a survey of 20,000 American adults aged 18 or older.
Nearly half of those adults report sometimes or always feeling alone.
46% or left out, 47%, depending on how you change the wording.
Half of Americans report being sometimes or always lonely, feeling alone.
One in four Americans, more than one in four, 27%, rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them.
That they have no one who understands what they're going through.
This total isolation for over a quarter of the country.
Two in five Americans, 40% of the country, sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful.
They're these shallow relationships.
43%.
And that they're isolated from others.
Same percentage.
43%.
This, I think, is because of the paltry view of friendship.
And that comes because we've elevated sex.
So we make sex the be-all and end-all.
You don't have to go to Australia or Oregon or India for that to happen.
That is pervasive around the civilized world.
There's a hook-up culture.
It's the swipe-right culture.
It's one that elevates sex.
And I'm not denigrating sex.
Sex is a cool thing, man.
I'm all for it.
But it's not the only type of relationship.
There are plenty of other types of relationship.
Aristotle wrote about friendship.
Friendship as the important thing.
The important relationship.
Love has been described as two people looking at one another.
Lovers are two people who look at one another.
And friends are two people who stand next to one another and look at the same thing.
They're pursuing the same good.
They're observing the same good.
And that kind of deep friendship, I think, is missing.
It's missing in part because we're so afraid to talk about anything.
People are afraid to talk about politics and religion.
Don't talk about politics or religion at the dinner table, folks.
That's what we're told.
It's because if I say, yes, I voted for Bob Dole in 96, they'll say, you vicious bigot voting for a moderate Republican.
So we're not willing to talk about anything that matters.
We're only willing to talk about dinner.
We say, this is good chicken.
Yeah.
Oh, how's the chicken?
Chicken's good, right?
That's all.
People just talk about the food.
That But shallowness is what makes people join wacky cults to search for something else because we know that's not sufficient in life.
We want to have meaningful relationships.
There was another big study that came out that said people hate small talk.
You don't need a study to tell you that.
Everybody hates small talk.
People say, I want to go to this dinner because I'm going to have to yammer on and babble about nothing over champagne or something.
People want to talk about things that matter.
They want to think about things that matter.
In the same survey from Pew, one in five people report that they rarely or never feel close to people.
They feel like there are people that they can talk to.
20% say they don't ever feel close to people.
There aren't meaningful relationships and it's because we have humiliated the view of friendship.
We've made it so shallow that it barely exists and we've also destroyed the view of relationships.
Now, you know, Cole Porter didn't sing, let's do it, let's be in a relationship until one of us wants to get out of it and then we'll swipe right again.
Right, that's not how the song goes.
Let's fall in love, let's give ourselves to one another.
That view is on the decline.
That's a minority view now, or it's a repressed view, and when you bottle something up for too long, it's going to come out in weird ways.
This survey also shows that Generation Z—so a lot of times when people talk about the youths, they talk about the millennials.
They say, oh, the millennials do this, the millennials do that.
But actually, the millennials are kind of old now.
I'm a millennial.
Millennials are late 20s, early 30s.
Generation Z— Are the people who are upwards of 22 years old.
Generation Z is reported to be the loneliest generation.
Of all generations alive today, they're the loneliest.
This is bizarre because you have the oldest generation alive.
They should be the loneliest, right?
Because all of their friends are dead or they're widowed or whatever.
No, they actually are doing relatively better than Generation Z. And a lot of people blame this on social media use.
They say, oh, it's because your heads are in your smartphones.
You're not having meaningful...
Relationships.
That all might be true, but social media use, according to this survey, is not a predictor of loneliness.
That's bizarre.
Loneliness fares the same among heavy social media users and light social media users.
What this means is, this is partially what allows bizarre cults and rituals to flourish.
This empty meanness and shallowness of materialism and abstracting things and saying, oh well...
I think of this person as an abstraction.
He's a Republican.
He's a Democrat.
He's a this-ist or a that-ist.
And they think only in terms of abstractions.
So people are drawn to these weird cultish activities.
People love farming.
People love being with people.
People love free love.
They love the tangible aspects of humanity, which in modern culture really doesn't cherish as much.
But it's...
It's an important aspect, and everybody's got to serve somebody.
When true religion goes away, people become very superstitious.
You can't avoid the metaphysical world, so you've got to channel these things into healthy ways, or else people are just going to get meaner and meaner and lonelier and lonelier, and I'm going to have to move to Australia and join the sex cult.
Okay, we've got a lot more to talk about because we have a bright side in this day in history, but before we get to that, I'm sorry, folks.
We've got to sign off.
I've also got some pretty cool, this is good news to announce.
I think Ben might have announced it on Twitter this morning.
Starting this Sunday, May 6th, join the one and only Ben Shapiro in a brand new edition of his podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
This is going to be really cool.
We've been filming things for this.
Ben will host a weekly in-depth conversation with the nation's brightest and best people on politics, news, culture, and We're good to go.
The Sunday special is going to be really, really cool.
This will be the premiere episode, so I think you'll really enjoy it.
In the meantime, you know, Daily Wire is on Apple News.
I just got my first iPhone.
I was on all these other fake iPhones for the last decade, and it is so much better.
I'm going to join that cult.
That's a wonderful cult.
But we're on Apple News now, so subscribe to that and listen.
The last pitch before I say goodbye to you who aren't subscribing.
Thank you for those who subscribe.
You help us keep the lights on.
You keep Covfefe in my cup.
Go to dailywire.com right now.
Ten bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership.
What do you get?
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
Sometimes you get British Phetasy on my show.
You get the conversation.
You get the Sunday special.
You get all this stuff, man, but none of it matters.
This is what matters.
Right now, we're going to have to get the Crip edition of the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
The Crips are so sad that Kanye got Kanye'd, that he's tweeting out Thomas Sowell quotes, that Snoop Dogg's cousin, Dimalima Ding Dong or whatever, I don't know what his name is, but he told the Crips to put out a hit on Kanye West.
So look, that Crip edition of the Leftist Tears, that's going to be tasty and delicious.
Because those guys, they put on a tough front, you know, but really, they can cry.
Look, real men can cry.
That's okay.
So make sure you get your Leftist Tears Tumblr or it will imperil your life and your health.
And I think my joking about the Crips has probably imperiled my life and my health.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
Okay, we don't have a ton of time left, but happy Law Day.
Happy Law Day, everybody.
That might not be the day that you have been hearing about, but it is the 60th annual Law Day, which is perhaps the most American holiday.
Law Day was proclaimed by Dwight Eisenhower And Congress passed the resolution for Law Day three years later.
This Law Day was first proposed by the American Bar Association in 1957.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're saying, Michael, this isn't Law Day.
It's May Day.
It's International Workers Unite Day.
It's the Labor Day in all parts.
Yeah, right.
No, not in America, baby.
Not in America.
The reason that we passed Law Day was to suppress May Day, which is a pagan holiday that was later appropriated by communists and became the International Workers' Day.
Only in America could we take a pagan communist holiday and say, no, we're going to make it about following American laws.
We're going to make it a day to celebrate the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
They defined Law Day when it passed as a national day set aside to celebrate the rule of law.
Law Day underscores how law and the legal process have contributed to the freedoms that all Americans share.
A special day of celebration by the American people in appreciation of their liberties and And I think what went unsaid, the subtext of that was, and as a big screw you to the communists.
Because May Day...
It was appropriated by the International Workers' Day, which was created formally in 1904.
There had been allusions to it before that.
By the Second International, the communist organization, calling on all social democratic party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the 1st of May for the class demands of the proletariat and for universal peace.
What that is, is fantasy.
It's a fantasy.
That's the difference between Law Day and International Workers' Day.
Is that the universal peace on earth, the utopia, we're going back to the Garden of Eden as long as I have to squish a few eggs to make an omelet and kill millions of people to affect my utopian vision.
But that's what we're going to have.
That's a fantasy.
That's the devil talking.
And America has Law Day.
That's the reality.
Actual liberties protected by actual institutions and actual law.
May 1st had been bubbling as a Workers' Day since the 1880s.
So a lot of countries around the world celebrate this as Labor Day.
We don't do it because we put Labor Day in September, which is very lucky so we don't get swept up in all this commie worldwide celebration.
And then it wasn't always a communist holiday.
May Day is a pagan holiday.
May Day is a pagan celebration of Floralia, which is the goddess of flowers.
It's an ancient pagan holiday.
When Europe became Christian, May Day became either secularized or Christianized.
So you'd have these secular celebrations, the start of summer, and you'd have these Christian celebrations.
In Germany, they celebrate it as the feast day of St.
Walburga, I don't have any German viewers anymore after I did the show about how Germany is the worst country in the world.
But for any of you who are still out there, happy St.
Walburga Day.
By the 18th century, this turned into devotions to Mary.
It's only one letter off, so May Day became a devotion to Mary, the Virgin Mary.
In recent years, neo-pagans have brought back The ancient paganism of May Day.
They've started to bring it back.
As paganism, I think, is the fastest growing religion in America.
When people get hedonistic, when people pretend that there's no true religion, they start to worship all sorts of superstitious things.
And this is a beautiful thing about America.
We take pagan communist goop and we Americanize it.
Christians have done this.
Christians did this throughout the spread of Western Christianity.
We would take pagan traditions and we would baptize them and make them Christian.
Sometimes fundamentalists get angry.
They say, the Christmas tree was a pagan Germanic ritual.
You say, right, but now it's a Christmas tree.
That's an improvement.
That's a step in the right direction when you take a pagan thing and you subdue it and transform it into a Christian thing.
Americans do this too.
We take holidays and we morph them into American holidays.
We Americanize them.
We don't negate.
We just build and transform them.
We build them up and we transform them.
That's what we have to do in the culture because if we don't do that, if we allow, if we ignore the popular culture, then we're going to get run over by it.
We're going to get hit by a bus.
This is why some people are upset about Kanye West.
They say, we shouldn't say nice things about Kanye because he's a crazy person.
And he might turn on us.
Yeah, that's fine.
But we can take that popular culture.
I don't love rap music.
I don't love hip-hop.
Surprise, surprise.
But you can take the little hold you can and transform it and build it.
Does that mean Kanye West is going to button up and become an Edmund Burke conservative?
I'm not putting money on it.
But we can take what we have of that popular culture.
Kanye West wants to be an independent thinker, a free thinker, be able to have his own say and protect his own liberties.
Maybe Cardi B wants to keep a little bit more of her money.
I don't blame her.
She makes a lot of money.
We take that and we can use that.
We can transform that.
We can use that to build upon.
And that's the American spirit.
May Day, the International Workers' Day, wants to tear down, tear down the hierarchies, tear down class structures, tear down civilization.
And what America does is build it all up and make America great again.
That's a good way to celebrate.
All right, that is our show.
I will see you all tomorrow.
Get your mailbag questions in for Thursday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
