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May 15, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
43:45
Ep. 156 - When Mueller Colluded With The Russians

A bombshell report uncovers a possible major conflict on interest for Robert Mueller and his never-ending Russia investigation. Then, legendary standup and SNL alum Dennis Miller stops by to talk comedy in the age of Trump. Finally, how to fix our ‘vomitive’ culture! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Because satire is now impossible and reality has become the only source of comedy, a new bombshell report reveals that after a full year of the Mueller investigation of Russia collusion, it turns out Mueller himself colluded with Russian oligarchs.
That is a true story.
You cannot make that up.
We will analyze this major conflict of interest for Robert Mueller and his never-ending probe.
Then, speaking of comedy, the legendary stand-up and SNL alum Dennis Miller stops by to talk comedy in the age of Trump.
Finally, a silver lining for our vomitive culture.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I like that word, vomitive.
That's good.
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We've got a lot to get to today.
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*clap* You're not going to believe this one today.
This news story is so good.
And I can't believe...
This is like the perfect punchline to the entire Robert Mueller Russia collusion investigation.
It turns out, in 2009, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, now investigating President Trump for colluding with the Russians, himself colluded with the Russians.
Whoa!
I know.
I'm just as shocked as you are.
It is an absurd punchline.
We'll get through this because I want to get to Dennis as quickly as we can.
Of all of the arguments to take down the Mueller investigation, to stop this anti-constitutional, clearly un-American power grab here to overturn a presidential election, of all of the arguments to take down this investigation, this one is the best.
Here's what happened.
See if you can follow this.
It kind of seems like a really weird, sad James Bond story, but because it's real-life government, there's a lot of just inefficiency and poor decisions that happened along the way.
So in 2009...
Robert Mueller was running the FBI and the FBI asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska for some help to help them with an operation that they were doing.
Even the name.
I have to assume that Oleg is short for oligarch?
Because that is like out of a cartoon that the Russian oligarch's name is Oleg?
Oleg!
So the FBI asks Oleg for some help on this operation.
I'm going to call him Garky.
I think that's another good nickname for him.
So the FBI asked Garky.
They asked Deripaska to spend millions of dollars of his own money to fund an FBI-backed operation to rescue a former FBI agent, Robert Levinson, who was captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.
Former FBI agent, now working for the CIA, abducted in Iran in 2007.
Now it's 2009.
FBI asks the Russian oligarch for help.
Deripaska agreed.
Deripaska spent millions of dollars of his own money.
He had meetings with the FBI.
He had meetings with that disgraced former FBI agent, Andrew McCabe, in Paris, in Vienna, in Budapest, in Hungary, in Washington, D.C., all over the place they meet.
They're working together very closely.
Now the operation worked.
They actually were able to locate Levinson with video and photographic evidence.
They tracked him down in Iran.
They were about to go get him.
And then Hillary Clinton shut everything down.
Hillary Clinton at the time was the Secretary of State.
She shut everything down at the last minute.
Who knows why?
Maybe she didn't want to deal with the political fallout.
Maybe she didn't want this mission to imperil her presidential ambitions.
Who knows?
They were on the verge of getting him.
Millions of dollars had been spent.
They had evidence they knew where he was.
And then he was gone.
The operation ended in 2011.
Levinson has never been found.
This is 11 years now after he was captured.
Score another failure for Hillary Clinton.
So this story, by the way, which is a punchline to the Mueller investigation, actually is another piece of evidence for why it's so good that we did not elect Hillary.
Because she totally bungled this and appears to have made certain political calculations that left this guy stranded in Iran, God knows where.
Back to Robert Mueller.
So the Russian oligarch, Deripaska, turned up in the Mueller investigation.
Deripaska has longstanding ties to Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman.
Manafort allegedly offered Deripaska private meetings about the 2016 campaign.
They had longstanding financial ties before this.
Deripaska sued Manafort this past January because he was alleging fraud in a 2007 investing deal.
So now let's bring in the hookers.
Now, Deripaska's former mistress, the Belarusian prostitute Anastasia Vashukovic, who was videotaped on a yacht with Deripaska and the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, because the oligarchs run the country, it's a very corrupt country, this Belarusian prostitute is claiming to have evidence that Deripaska had a plan to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Okay, so you say, where's the evidence?
Let's bring in the evidence.
The only trouble, of course, and this happens with Belarusian hookers, is that she's currently stuck in a Thai prison.
Are you still with me?
Are you still tracking this?
Because there's a lot going on.
So, put that aside.
Speaking of hookers, Deripaska is one of the Russians that the FBI questioned about the Democrat-funded hit-job dossier that alleged that Donald Trump paid Russian hookers to relieve themselves on a bed that Barack Obama once slept on.
Now, the FBI, after this was alleged to have happened, the FBI busted into Deripaska's hotel room.
They asked him about that crazy dossier, the Democrat-funded dossier.
Deripaska laughed at them because he thought they were kidding, because the story is absurd.
Now, okay, none of this really matters much so far.
We've got some hookers, we've got some strange preferences in bedrooms, we've got some corruption.
Okay, fine.
Everybody in the world has a plan to interfere in the U.S. presidential election.
Oligarchs frequent a lot of hookers.
These are tales as old as time.
Nothing really special here.
What matters here is that Robert Mueller has not mentioned Deripaska in the Manafort indictment.
Despite Derisbaskis being a central figure in all of Manafort's dealings with Russia.
So we've got this huge, wide-ranging Russia probe.
We've got Manafort actually being indicted.
And yet the central Russian figure here just doesn't show up on the indictment.
That's a little weird.
We also know that the United States has recently instituted sanctions against Deripaska.
The duly elected government, this is coming out of the White House, has been dealing very harshly with Deripaska, but the unelected anti-constitutional bureaucracy has been playing softball with him.
Now, why would Robert Mueller play softball with Deripaska?
Well, Mueller, as the director of the FBI, asked a Russian oligarch to underwrite an FBI operation to get around US laws.
Mueller tried to do something indirectly that he was explicitly prohibited from doing directly.
Now, okay, he's trying to subvert the law.
He's trying to, okay, that doesn't look good.
But then what really matters is the quid pro quo here.
Because if you're not familiar with Russian oligarchs, one characteristic of them is they don't generally do favors in exchange for nothing.
They don't do things out of the goodness of their heart.
Russian oligarchs are not known for the goodness of their hearts.
So the question is, what did Deripaska get or expect in return for his $25 million donation to Mueller's FBI? Maybe, I don't know, does that explain why this particular Russian oligarch didn't turn up on Mueller's indictments?
Maybe did Mueller want to avoid the transparency that is required by law?
I don't know.
Let's ask all of the experts on this across the political aisle.
That's what Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is saying.
Alan Dershowitz thinks this was a way to avoid transparency because he might have broken the law.
Melanie Sloan, who's a former Justice Department lawyer for Bill Clinton, former Clinton administration lawyer, she wonders if the first FBI operation was even legal.
Because that first FBI operation, where the FBI asked the Russians to fund this operation, looks like it violated the Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits the government from accepting voluntary services.
And the reason it does that makes perfect sense, because then there's an obligation.
There's a debt to be paid off, and it gets really tricky down the line when you start indicting people for Russian collusion, but you don't indict the central Russian oligarch.
GW constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, he thinks exactly the same thing.
This is not a right-wing conspiracy.
This is not Sean Hannity saying this on his show.
This is Dershowitz, Sloan, Turley.
These are all people who have worked quite publicly for Democrats, but they're very good lawyers and this is their legal opinion.
This is the best ending to all of this, isn't it?
Isn't this the best ending to all of this?
Because this Mueller thing has been going on forever.
It's been going on, I don't know, since I think the Coolidge administration at this point.
But there was the FBI investigation, then the Mueller thing.
It's basically the one-year anniversary of the Mueller investigation.
And now the punchline is, Robert Mueller colluded with the Russians.
It's just, what credibility does he have?
What credibility does this investigation now have?
We know that it's probably unconstitutional.
It seems to violate the Supreme Court's rulings, and I think the case was Morrison v.
Olson, both the opinion and the dissent of the court.
We know it's far too expansive, but also it seems that even in the carrying out of it, They're trying to avoid transparency.
They're trying to skirt the law.
They're trying to cover up possibly illegal actions that were undertaken by the head of this investigation ten years ago, nine years ago.
Doesn't look like there's a lot of credibility here, but keep looking.
I'm sure you'll find that Russian collusion somewhere.
You might find it really, really close to home.
You might find it, oh, it might actually be you guys who are doing it.
Really, really wild.
The Democrats pay, collude with the Russians and pay for this Steele dossier.
Then the FBI seems to be colluding with the Russians.
I think Donald Trump is the only guy in this country who has not colluded with the Russians.
Donald Trump may be the last American who didn't collude with the Russians.
Unbelievable.
We've got to get to Dennis Miller before we do that.
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Okay, in the age of Donald Trump, reality is funnier than absolutely any sketch or stand-up act around.
Nevertheless, we will get to a professional funny man and one of my favorite comedians, Dennis Miller.
Dennis Miller just launched his second weekly podcast for Podcast One.
It's titled The Dennis Miller Option, where he discusses headlines, pop culture, and tries to make sense of an increasingly nonsensical world.
Here's Dennis.
Dennis, thank you for being here.
Nice to be here, my friend.
How's your day?
It's going very well.
It's going pretty nicely.
Now, you have won.
I don't know about you.
I guess we'll all have to just bite our lips and soldier on without Iran right now.
It is really hard.
Do you think we'll make it?
It's like my Sherpa told me when we were above the kill zone on Everest.
Just put one foot in front of each other and keep moving.
Somehow, we'll get through this together.
I hope, you know, I was so nervous because Ben Rhodes and Dan Pfeiffer, they assured me that everything was going to fall apart without the cooperation of the worst regime on planet Earth.
I hope we can make it.
I hope we can make it.
You know, I feel unprotected.
I've been with them so long, probably since not without my daughter.
The Betty Mahmoudi story is when I was first introduced to the lovely vibe in Iran.
But somehow, like I said...
We'll soldier out.
We'll truck along.
Now, I want to talk about another great foe of the United States, Michelle Wolfe.
Now, you have won multiple Emmy Awards.
You've won Writers Guild Awards.
You've hosted a bunch of TV shows.
You've hosted radio, podcast, the Dennis Miller option.
You've also headlined the White House Correspondents Dinner back in the Bush one years.
I wanted to know, on a scale of Hiroshima to Nagasaki, how badly did Michelle Wolfe bomb?
I don't think she did in her world, right?
People...
Listen, you have to understand, it's a completely...
It's a schism now between the two sides.
I think on her side, she was...
I never know if the word is F-E-T-E-D. It's faded.
You know, I think she was probably praised.
My only thing was when I read about it, and I got angry because I saw Sarah Sanders sitting there.
She was going to cry.
I said, who is this?
I did not know who it was, so I put up a...
Tweet about researching her and getting back with a joke on Wednesday, which is when my podcast is, and all of a sudden it was like it absolutely I hit the fan and I realized that the internet really is the Wild West.
You put up something that a lady would say underwritten, all of a sudden you're like the old lady who goes over the Horseshoe Falls with a trashcan and ends up in the whitewater churn.
At the bottom you're just getting dermabraided out the wazoo for a day or two.
And then I realized, I guess that's what the internet is about.
And when you were in the crosshairs of it, you should handle it with a suitable degree of aplomb, because certainly I love people on Twitter.
So that's the way it happens, and it happens quickly.
It seems like it happens, boom!
Well, I saw that tweet when you sent it out, and I immediately got it.
I got the joke.
You know, no one knows who this woman is, and you're going to have to research her, and then you can talk about it on the show.
And immediately, everyone pounces on you, and they say, ha-ha, you don't have a quick wit.
Ha-ha.
And I couldn't tell if it was the left being obtuse.
Or if they genuinely just didn't get it.
And this does bring us to it, I think, the defining characteristic of the Trump era, which is that the left is humorless these days.
And conservatives, during the Obama years, conservatives still had a sense of humor, but now the left seems totally humorless.
Why can't they take a joke right now?
Oh, I don't know.
You know, I will say this.
When Obama won...
And I watched that feast that first night in Grant Park.
And I think that's the park in Chicago, right?
I'm not that much of a Chicago den of it.
But then I saw those upturned faces and people with all that hope in that.
And I thought, this will be good for this country.
Honest to God, I remember thinking, I hope he does well.
I'll give him a few months here to see.
But I don't think...
Well, like you were laughing that I put that thing up about...
I don't think the left has handled Hillary's loss all that well.
You don't say.
It's the simple truth that I think that was such a lock in their head that all I can say is it must be it must have been a cataclysm for them.
I remember when I watched the Jacob Javits Center that first night and it was like a snowflake Jonestown.
And I thought, my God, I have never in all my years of having political opinions have you ever come within a A light year of crying over a politician.
I don't take it like that.
It's not that important.
Obama's approach to it was not my approach, but he seemed like a genial bloke, seemed like a good family man.
I didn't agree with a lot of it, but I never hated him.
I never wanted to cry that he became president.
I was just looking at it and I go, I guess they've got more vested in it on the secular side because they seem genuinely You know, devastated.
I just don't get that devastated.
So can I speak and say that there's nobody on the left who's having any fun with it?
No, I can't.
I see some guys who are having fun with it.
But can I say, by and large, the left was devastated by her loss?
Yeah, which is surprising to me, because I didn't even think she was the ideal candidate.
It's not like Obama lost or something.
You can see he has charisma.
He's a great speaker.
And like I said, he was of the era.
You can understand why that might have been.
But Hillary, I mean, Jesus.
Say what you will about Donald Trump, but give him this.
I think that his outer voice is indeed an accurate depiction of his inner voice, warts and all.
Whereas I don't think Hillary's inner voice and outer voice have ever even had a cup of coffee together.
So to see people crying about it, I thought, my gosh, something's happened here.
It's the...
It's bizarre.
Are they humorous about it?
I don't know.
I think they're starting to lick their wounds a little more.
But up to this point, I would say that there's a pretty virulent schism in this country right now.
And whenever they, the ones who have just lost, get a shot, they're going to take a shot at you.
Guess what?
but that's the way of the world.
And it was, I love that phrase, the snowflake Jonestown.
That is when you looked out of that scene, that Brooklyn scene when Hillary lost, I remember John Podesta came out because she didn't show up.
She was throwing desk lamps in her hotel room or something.
And he comes out and he says, thank you for being here for Hillary.
She's always been here for you, except for right now, the only time it matters.
And she's not here They were devastated, and yeah, that side is more secular.
The Democrats booed God at their national convention a few years ago, so perhaps they've got some misplaced longings.
But when I watched that set of Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, I didn't hear many jokes.
She told a few jokes, but what I heard a lot of is she just accused people of being liars.
That was like her punchline.
She said, you're a liar, and you lie, and you're a disappointment to women, as though that were...
Sufficient to qualify as a joke, which I don't think it did.
How was the culture of that dinner and politics and political comedy, how radically different was it back in the early 90s when you were doing it for George Bush Sr.?
Well, first off, I would say that Whether you liked her jokes or hated her jokes, I don't think she did that badly in the room.
Am I missing the point?
No, you're absolutely right.
Those journalists were laughing.
Yeah, when I listened to clips and when I saw people cutaways like they always do, people were laughing a lot, I think.
I remember when I missed it.
Didn't I missed it one year?
and I do remember that being a bit of a train wreck, wasn't it?
Didn't I miss coming?
It was actually quiet in the room.
I mean, they did give it to Michelle in the room.
I sort of felt it was that distinction of claps, not laughs, that they were going along with her because she was saying things that they politically agreed with, even if she wasn't reinventing comedy.
I'll have to defer to your expertise.
I remember getting some laughs.
And I will say this.
I was surprised to hear that nobody vetted it.
Because when I did it for Bush 41, I'm telling you, I had to get my wazoo armor all.
I was so vetted out the wazoo.
I had to run jokes by the White House correspondence people.
I had to run jokes by the White House people.
And then when I was in the green room, I remember Bush 41 was such a mensch.
He comes up and he says, I'm with Bart, and I don't say the F word.
And I say, oh, Mr.
President, you think I'm going to crank up an F word in front of me?
So it was a bit of a different thing then.
But listen, man, the curtain comes down on the culture now in the space of an evening.
It can happen midway through an evening.
In a commercial break, the culture can change.
Back then, when is that?
I don't even know when I did it.
Is it 15 years ago, 18 years ago?
I'm not sure.
Well, come on.
It's over 5,500 days.
The world turns now in around 15 seconds.
Things go away or they come back.
We're living.
I assume it was always like this.
Even in primordial days, I assume this is human behavior.
It's just now through social media, the entire world is privy to your synapses, your reactions to things, our animus, our collective consciousness.
It all happens In real time, almost, all across the planet.
I would say the big thing that's changed is social media.
Do I think human nature's changed?
No.
I think there'll be a point in somewhere way down the line where you don't even hear this stuff.
Like, it's the Outer Limits episode where David McCallum gets a huge skull and they can just start talking to each other with your thoughts.
Then we can tear each other a new asshole and never even open our mouths.
I think that's what's coming down the road.
So I think right now all this changes is the animus level is consistent throughout history.
It's just that right now we're all privy to each other's crankiness.
Well, that's certainly true that the culture can change on a dime.
Speaking of cultural changes on social media, I know you've been on Twitter a little bit.
I've been perusing your Twitter feed the last couple weeks.
You might have heard of this fella, Kanye West.
He's a famous rapper, apparently.
And he's been tweeting a lot of very conservative-sounding things.
Very conservative, though.
He's tweeting out Scott Adams videos and Thomas Sowell quotes and all these little conservative YouTube videos.
Wow.
Do you think that that reflects any change in the culture, no matter how short that change may be?
Are the conservatives and the right finally winning a little bit of the popular culture with Donald Trump and Kanye West, or am I celebrating too much and reading too much into it?
No, I think, listen, next to Warhol in the future, everybody will be famous for 15 Minutes.
Which, looking back on, I had always taken him with a bit of a grain of salt, because I'm not a modern artist then, and I always thought he was just a Studio 54 sort of New York downtown scene guy.
But when I look back on that, that is so prescient that I think I should read more about him, because that's a pretty brilliant thing to say.
The second most brilliant thing I've heard, or 1A, is that Breitbart's saying that politics are downstream from culture.
And I do think this Kanye West thing Listen, up to this point in my life, my introduction, my only knowledge of Kanye West, since I'm not a hip-hop fan, is that I remember him being loaded on stage at an awards ceremony with Taylor Swift and grabbing her award thingy.
That's very boorish behavior.
That's my take on him.
But when I see what he's done in the last couple weeks, do I lionize him?
Is he my new, you know, ID fix?
Is he the monolith in 2001?
I don't think that, but that's a pretty important defection on their side.
I really think that, I think he, in the lexicon of the day, I think he was tired of getting played.
I think the Democrats are playing African Americans, and I think that things are starting to fall.
It's really interesting what he did.
Sol's been out there for years on the front lines of this.
You know, just the fact that Kanye West is reading Thomas Sowell, I thought, well, good for you, brother, because I like a curious mind.
And Thomas Sowell is brilliant, absolutely brilliant man who they've been ignoring for years.
So is there some fissure there?
Yeah.
Now, I don't quite understand why I don't hear as much about it now.
Is it strictly on that flash poll they did where Trump's approval goes from 11 in the black community to 22% in the black community, and as maybe the people on the left thinking, we can't keep crucifying Kanye, because that's not going to play.
I just like, I like free thinkers.
I like people who don't walk in lockstep.
And when he stepped out like that, I thought, well, I now have another swing put on Kanye West.
It's not just grabbing the trophy off Taylor Swift.
I should learn a little more about this cat, because I think what he's done is pretty brave, and I think it's opened up an amazing tributary of dialogue.
Remember Eric Calder always said, this country's too afraid to have that conversation?
All right, well, where's Eric Holder coming forward in the last week or so and say, well, I guess somebody is not afraid to have a conversation.
We found the guy.
Yeah, well, I really think, I hope that's what Holder was referring to.
The fact that this guy's not getting much, you know, supply train support is, I think that's very telling.
I think that's going to help Kanye's cause more than it will help the liberal cause.
That is a really good point.
And you've been a comedian and an amazing cultural observer for such a long time and really one of my favorites.
On this point that you brought up a little earlier on the boorishness of the culture or the F word that...
George Bush Sr.
He said, oh, come on, I got my wife here tonight.
Don't go blue.
Or that sort of thing.
Now, it's not just the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
It's not just Kanye taking that award from Taylor Swift.
You hear it, even those Comedy Central roasts, with few exceptions, are so often just a litany of vulgarities and the most...
Trying to one-up one another of the most disgusting thing to say.
We use a loose language all the time now.
Is there any hope that the culture will rebound in a way that gives us back a little dignity or a little class or using language in a nicer, more elevated way?
Or do you think for the time being that might be lost and we've got to navigate these new waters that we're in?
I would be phony if I commented on that.
I say the F-bomb all the time in my head.
That's true.
I just don't do it on air.
Well, except when the job description is not.
But left to my own devices, I find it a good word in my act.
Am I vulgar in my act?
No, I don't think I am.
But if I use the F-bomb, yeah, I can't lecture anybody on that.
But when I'm in front of a president, or when I'm on TV, or when I'm in front of a corporate crowd that doesn't need that stern and drang in their day, is it very easy for me to not do it?
Of course it is.
Every time I do a corporate, I say to the guy, I say, who's the guy who signs this check?
And then I say to him, do you want it?
PG, do you want it?
PG-13, or do you want it R? And if he says PG, I say, fine, there'll be no swearing in it.
If he wants PG-13, I say, fine, there might be a couple swear words, but I won't use the F-blog.
I just find it easy to shift that stuff out.
And like I said, is there a new vulgarianism in the country?
I don't think so.
I think this is the way it has always been in small clutches, except our small clatch now is the entire world due to social media.
I really think that social media never have lived, less lived, been more chronicled.
The minutiae, the inocuia, to invent a word.
I think that might be Elizabeth Warren's in it, by the way.
Yeah, good use of the native language.
We're all privy to that now.
This is all the stream of consciousness that for years was either in our own head, in our own living room, or with our own friends at a tavern or a bar, or with a group of like-minded people.
Now everybody knows everything about everybody.
And when I say that social media has allowed us to all come together as one, And probably realized there was never really any good reason for us to all come together as one.
That is a devastating but accurate observation.
Because it's true.
When I tweet or I go on Facebook, I don't feel as though I'm addressing a crowd of thousands.
I feel like I have a drink in my hand and I'm spouting off on whatever thing crosses my mind.
That is very true.
It makes you think twice before you tweet.
Dennis, before I let you go, you have this new podcast.
It's very, very good.
The Dennis Miller option.
It just launched.
How's it going and where can people find it?
Well, listen, I've done two, and the third one's on tomorrow.
Dana Carvey's on.
You can download these on iTunes, and I'm just learning the lexicon, so I will spare you hearing me say, we drop on Wednesdays, like I'm, you know, putting out a new album.
We appear on Wednesdays, and you can go to podcast one.
I was bringing sports one, but we decided to get rid of it because I found out that sports is The most you're going to get, it seems to me, unless you're a big Dan Patrick or something like that, you're probably going to get $20,000.
People were sending me emails, but I'm not saying they were shoveling them in like coal into a speeding train car, but I wasn't getting emails saying, listen, I like residency, but I don't like sports.
So we're putting it into a more generic thing called the Dennis Miller option.
We're probably going to do two of those a week.
The next one's tomorrow.
Like I said, it's an hour with car reach.
It's absolutely the best guest.
He and Marty Short in the history of any sort of medium.
And it's comedy.
It's my thoughts on the world.
It's my thoughts on politics.
It's just sort of stream of consciousness for an hour.
I was just looking at it on iTunes, and I don't know much about the ratings, but it seems to be okay on there.
And we'll see how it goes.
I think that you pretty much have to fall back into this and say, Say out loud what you're thinking and see who shows up for that.
If it's enough, they keep you on.
If it isn't, they whack you.
That's sort of where I'm at.
It's really, really good.
I listened to the first episode right when it came out.
I don't want to fangirl too much, you know, but I am a big Dennis Miller fan myself and have been for years.
So everybody, I highly recommend going out and getting the podcast.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
You can't see me right now, but I'm blushing, even in my swarthy Italian skin.
Dennis, very good to talk to you.
In the future, like I said, if we know everybody's thoughts on the future, there will be a blush-o-meter on your iPhone.
Yeah, that's right.
That's something I probably shouldn't tweet.
Note to self.
Dennis, thank you so much for being here.
Great to talk to you, and I'm looking forward to the podcast with Dana.
All right.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Dennis Miller.
How cool is that guy?
On Saturday, May 19th, Dennis will be performing at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee.
On Saturday, June 23rd, Dennis will be taping his next stand-up special at the Bijou Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Dennis can also be heard on his other weekly podcast, Red Circle Sports, with Dennis Miller with Podcast One and his twice-daily syndicated 60-second radio feature, The Miller Minute.
I want to get some of those.
That guy's got so many podcasts.
Okay, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Don't forget...
Don't forget, the conversation is today.
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There it is.
Now, I have been sipping deep the John Kerry vintage for the last week.
The Kanye vintage.
Kanye caused all of those to pour in.
And those were delicious.
I'm saving those now for a special occasion because now I'm on the Bob Mueller colluded with the Russians vintage.
Oh, that's a really sophisticated brew.
And it is best served cold.
Because after a year of Democrats trying to overturn this presidential election, now it looks like they're the ones who colluded with the Russians.
Mmm, serve it cold.
Nice chilled leftist tears.
Mmm, mmm, mmm.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back to talk about our vomitive culture.
Vomitive.
I'm just covering this story so that I can say the word vomitive.
The word vomitive is being used to describe Lars von Trier's new murder movie called The House That Jack Built.
It's at Cannes Film Festival.
Here is the preview for The House That Jack Built.
The old cathedrals often have sublime artworks hidden away in the darkest corners for only God to see.
The same goes for murder.
Apparently that's the only eight second clip of the movie that does not entail dismembering children, so that's all they could use for the trailer.
This movie just debuted at con, and it actually prompted the moviegoers, almost uniformly, to storm out of the theater in disgust.
That's true.
Just to point this out, because it should go without saying, but some people aren't familiar with these festivals, it's not that it caused an audience of your sweet aunt Ethel to storm out in disgust.
It caused the attendees of the Cannes Film Festival to leave in disgust.
The Cannes Film Festival attendees are some of the most decadent, debauched people on the face of the earth.
They're all these show business types.
They're show business elites.
How many times has Harvey Weinstein attended the Cannes Film Festival?
One of the attendees this year, Kirsten Stewart, took off her shoes on the red carpet and walked in barefoot.
They are debased people.
They are debauched people.
And even they said that this movie is too much.
One reviewer said of the film, he said that it is gross, pretentious, vomitive, torturous, and pathetic.
That's actually the review that Ben gave of my show, but it applies differently to this movie because of how gruesome and bloody it is.
Another reviewer called it, a vile movie should not have been made actors culpable.
As if to say, the people who just got the script, they just played their parts, they are morally culpable for how filthy and rotten and demonic this movie is.
So, what's the movie about?
According to Rotten Tomatoes, Lars von Chaya, his upcoming drama, quote, follows the highly intelligent Jack, Matt Dillon, over a span of 12 years and introduces the murders that define Jack's development as a serial killer.
We experience the story from Jack's point of view.
Well, he postulates each murder is an artwork in itself.
As the inevitable police intervention is drawing nearer, he takes greater and greater risks in his attempt to create the ultimate artwork of dismembering children.
One viewer from Khan, this is not a reviewer, but one of the people who saw it tweeted out and said...
Seeing children being shot and killed is not art or entertainment.
So this, you know, people have been scandalized by artwork for a very long time.
This is nothing new.
But perhaps this has gone too far.
Perhaps, who knows?
I haven't seen the movie yet.
I've only seen the eight seconds, which still have blood all over them, but apparently they're the safest to air.
I think there's a silver lining here, actually, for the culture.
You might ask, what is the silver lining to naming and mutilating children?
The silver lining, I think, is that the culture has turned a corner.
Because you can keep going down this path.
Obviously, certain material would be shocking, even 50 years ago, that today would be absurd.
You know, Ricky and Lucy on I Love Lucy, they didn't sleep in the same bed.
They're a married couple and they slept in separate beds on this show because it would have been too scandalous, too out there, to show them sleeping in the same bed.
They couldn't use the word pregnant.
That was a culture back then.
Now you just maim and torture all of these children on screen, and that's pushing a boundary slightly.
These things can't go on forever.
A grotesque culture will exhaust itself eventually.
Jimmy Kimmel actually talked about this yesterday.
He said, oh, I think we've had enough of the Trump jokes, of the Trump hate.
Have you, Jimmy?
You hate Donald Trump.
But they've just gotten to the end.
What more is there to do?
How much further can you go?
Kanye West is talking about this.
He says, you know, everyone's just hating really hard and hating and hating and mean and mean and hating and hating.
I'm going to love people.
I'm going to try something different.
I'm going to do something that's not within the popular culture.
Facebook and Twitter are talking about this even.
They're offering a bad solution because their solution is censorship, but they're talking about this problem of just meanness and crassness and vulgarity.
People criticize Donald Trump for being a little bit vulgar, but they themselves behave in a much more vulgar way than the president does.
Maybe, you know, take a look at the man in the mirror, huh?
There's so much meanness.
There's so much coarseness and vulgarity.
Michelle Wolfe at that White House Correspondence Dinner is so gross.
How much further can you go?
It's like the experience of reading the Marquis de Sade.
If you ever read it, the Marquis de Sade wrote a book called 120 Days of Sodom, and he's where we get sadism from and sadistic.
So the Marquis de Sade was both a pornographer and a philosopher.
And you read it, and you start to read it, and you think, ooh, this is a little...
Ooh, this is a little titillating.
Oh, yikes.
Should I be aroused by it?
I don't know.
And then you get to the end and you're just so horrified and disgusted with the material and with yourself.
It sounds like this movie, you know, which is just people are doing all sorts of depraved things and it gets violent and vicious and all of that.
And by the end you say, ah...
Gross.
It's the experience, I think, of whenever you really feast the flesh.
So whenever...
Let's just use Thanksgiving as an example.
You could use more scintillating examples, but let's use Thanksgiving.
You go and you say, okay, I'm just going to eat as much as I can all day.
So you start out the day, you start eating and drinking and eating pie and turkey.
By the end, you don't want to eat anymore.
You're just so fat and full and disgusted with yourself.
Tired and you want to go to bed and do something else.
This is true whenever you feast the flesh on anything.
It could be sex.
It could be gambling.
It could be drinking.
It could be carousing.
Whatever.
You just get exhausted by the end of it.
And I think that's what the culture has done here with crassness and meanness and vulgarity.
That's not to say that we're going to have a really nice, pristine culture now.
I just think we've sort of reached the end of it.
In some ways, the Trump election might mark the end of that.
And what comes afterwards?
I don't know, but you're seeing the culture slowly starting to move.
And if these debauched, depraved showbiz types are going to walk out of a movie because it's too crass and vulgar and violent, that could be a good sign.
Things are looking bright among all of the dead bodies on screen and the husk of our culture.
Things could be getting better.
Okay, make sure to tune in for the conversation.
That will be happening in like three seconds.
It's going to be at 2.30 Pacific, 5.30 Eastern Time.
So do that.
It'll be with Alicia Krause and me and ask all of your questions.
I won't answer.
I believe Ben touted my conversation as me staring blankly at the screen and then quoting an obscure Catholic theologian that nobody's heard of.
That's probably what's going to happen.
So, you know, tune in.
And I'll just, I'll give you this.
Just straight, just...
And then I'll quote some theologians.
But you've got to tune in to find out which one.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you in like an hour.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
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Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
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Edited by Jim Nickel.
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