After months of high-stakes negotiations, the Kim Summit is back on, and it won’t be happening in Singapore. That’s right, Kim Kardashian is coming to the WH to discuss criminal justice reform! We’ll analyze the political and philosophical ramifications of the summit. Then, Allie Stuckey drops by to give advice on love, marriage, and children—not necessarily in that order. Finally, a special pre-honeymoon Mailbag!
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After months of high stakes negotiations, the Trump-Kim summit is finally back on.
That's right.
Kim Kardashian is coming to the White House.
She's going to be talking about criminal justice reform.
I know that's the Kim summit you've all been waiting for.
We will analyze the political and philosophical ramifications of the Kim summit.
There's actually a lot to see here and a lot of new directions for the administration.
Then Allie Stuckey will stop by to give me advice on love and sex and marriage and children, at least three of those four.
We will get to her and we'll talk about other things as well.
And then we will have the mailbag because I'm going away on my honeymoon for a week and I want to be able to talk to you.
You people, you people whom I love so much.
I want to be able to talk to you before I go away.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show.
We'll see you next time.
Before we get to the Kim summit, before we get to the Kim Kardashian summit, I guess we still have to talk about Roseanne, right?
We still have to talk about it.
Roseanne has been trending on Twitter for the last 48 hours just consecutively.
And listen, I get it.
You know, she's actually been pretty gracious about all this.
She says, don't try to defend my tweet.
It's indefensible.
It's a bad joke.
I'm sorry I said it.
You know, whatever, right?
Um...
The thing I really don't want us to lose sight of while everybody is criticizing Roseanne is that Valerie Jarrett is a terrible person.
I don't want us to fall into this trap where we really don't want Democrats to call us racists.
So then we tried it.
Now we're like defending Valerie Jarrett.
Valerie Jarrett is awful.
Just a quick little rundown.
She was the top personal aide to Barack Obama for his entire presidency and really before the presidency.
She goes back in Chicago a long ways with Barack and Michelle.
The Obama White House.
These are people who work for Barack Obama, referred to her as the night stalker.
She who must not be challenged.
She would follow the Obamas into the private residence at night and keep talking to them.
Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's chief of staff, regularly referred to Valerie Jarrett alternately as Uday and Kusey Hussein.
They did not have a high opinion of her.
She had a staff of three dozen and she did everything from decide who goes to state dinners to what gifts should be given to foreign heads of state.
She might have been behind the idea of Obama giving Queen Elizabeth an iPod full of his own speeches.
Who knows?
But she also was in charge of advising on who should be nominated to the Supreme Court, advising on who should be appointed as certain ambassadors.
Really a wide breadth of power.
She was considered effectively the chief of staff.
That's why she butted heads with all of Obama's chiefs of staff.
It was her idea to appoint Van Jones, 9-11 truther Van Jones, to a czar position at the White House.
She pushed Solyndra at the White House.
She got Barack Obama to give a speech at Solyndra headquarters.
She helped crush American business when she was the White House liaison to the business community.
Obviously, the Obama White House was terrible on business.
She was the main liaison there.
Larry Summers, by the way, agreed with that.
Another Obama official agreed with that.
When Valerie Jarrett comes from Chicago, she is a crony corrupt Chicago politician on the order of Barack Obama, but only more so.
So when she was in Chicago, she was the CEO of this crony Democrat Chicago real estate firm called The Habitat Company, When she was CEO of The Habitat Company, Valerie Jarrett built some of the worst public housing slums in the entire country.
Many of those required federal intervention to fix.
She was practically a slumlord.
In 2011, Valerie Jarrett disrespected a four-star general because she was in an event with him and she ordered a drink from him.
She wanted him to...
or she thought that he was a waiter or something like that.
I'm going to keep going on because there's a lot more to say about Valerie Jarrett.
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Okay.
Back to Valerie Jarrett.
Back to how terrible she is.
Because now conservatives are defending Valerie Jarrett like a bunch of dum-dums.
So she was practically a slumlord when she was the head of that company, Habitat Company in Chicago.
She demanded a full security detail when she was in the White House, even though it wasn't quite clear what her job was.
Other than just being a powerful person behind the scenes, lasted the entire presidency.
She demanded a full security detail.
A lot of Obama aides said it was for simple prestige.
She was a flatterer.
She's a crony.
She's got longstanding ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, spoken as a keynote at Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organization at national events.
So many of her family were anti-American, radical communists, associated with communists.
Her family members were under FBI surveillance for that reason.
Stop defending Valerie Jarrett.
Stop it.
A lot of conservatives are saying right now that we have to disavow Roseanne, we have to call her Hitler, we have to say Roseanne is a neo-Nazi and she's terrible and I hate her and her no-good stinking dog too.
Otherwise, Democrats will call us racist.
That's what they say.
And this is the worst illogic of conservatives.
It is such weak sauce.
Don't do it.
Who cares if a Democrat calls you a racist?
You know why I don't care when Democrats call me a racist?
Because I'm not a racist.
Because I don't despise people because of their race.
I don't want to discriminate against people because of their race.
So I don't care when Democrats say that.
A key to a happy life is not caring what your political opponents say.
Who cares what Democrats say about you?
They have no moral authority.
They have no credibility.
I do not care.
They can slap me on the back and call me Charlie for all I care.
It doesn't matter.
I am not a racist.
I don't care what Democrats say.
They are morally bankrupt Democrats.
I would much rather be called a racist than a Democrat, by the way, because a Democrat is an actual racist, right?
I mean, that is one of the worst epithets you can call somebody, is Democrat.
They're morally bankrupt.
Their words on this matter have no effect.
Stop sucking up to them.
Stop trying to get your approval.
They're going to call you all manner of evil things, regardless of what you do.
Be good.
Do the right thing.
Don't discriminate against people because of their race.
Don't hate people because of their race.
And don't care what Democrats say.
It's very, very foolish.
Okay, let's get into the big news of the day.
Kim is coming to the White House.
We thought these peace talks had all broken down.
But no.
The Supreme Leader, Kim Kardashian, is coming to the White House.
That cultural dictator, Kim Kardashian, is going to make it to the White House.
I am obviously...
You might have thought I was talking about the little fat guy in Korea.
I am absolutely not.
We are talking about another global scourge, Kim Kardashian.
She will be coming for comment right now.
We turn to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
Why is everyone so stupid?
Why aren't more people intelligent like me?
I'm so stupid.
We're lonely, so lonely, so lonely and sadly alone.
There's no one, just me only, sitting on my little throne.
I work weary hard and make up great plans, but nobody listens, no one understands.
Seems like no one takes me to the restroom.
And so, I'm Ronery.
A bit of laundry.
Pour it on me.
Sad.
That's really sad.
That's really heartbreaking to see.
We're going to get into what this Kim Kardashian talk means, plus we'll have some mailbag and talking to Ali Stuckey, because this Kim Kardashian talk actually really does matter, and we should pay attention because it's not just a little sideshow.
It is an important piece of policy that's going on right now.
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Okay, so we're running low on time here, but I'm going to fly through these.
Kim Kardashian, what's she going to the White House to talk about?
She's going there to meet with Jared Kushner about prison reform, criminal justice reform.
This is something, this is one of these issues that lefties are pushing and conservatives who want to seem like cool guys and get approval from the left.
They are pretending is important now to criminal justice reform.
What it really means is letting criminals out of prison.
When you hear criminal justice reform, usually what you're hearing is let's let bad guys out of prison.
So anyway, Kim Kardashian wants to go and talk to Kushner about this.
But part of the reason that Kushner really cares about this issue is that Jared Kushner's father went to prison for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, witness tampering when Kushner was a younger, younger boy.
And so now he wants to get Republicans to back letting criminals out of prison.
So Kushner is pushing this bill called the first step act, the first step act.
This is what Kushner said.
It illustrates a total misunderstanding of this issue, but we can explain why that is.
He says, if we start showing that we can make the prisons more purposeful and more effective at lowering the recidivism rate over time, that may help the people who are trying to make the argument for sentencing reform.
So Trump said he would sign this bill.
It just passed the House overwhelmingly, 360 to 59.
This is where Jared Kushner's Democrat card is showing, and I hope Republicans don't fall for this.
So it's the First Step Act, right?
And what they do in D.C. is they make these acts.
It's like these very long acronyms.
So it's the Formerly Incarcerated Re-Enter Society Transformed Safely Transitioning Every Person Act.
Ugh.
What it does is it gives out good time credits to prison inmates, and it can cut a week per year off of their sentence, but it works retroactively.
So there are going to be people who, when this passes, they'll just get out of jail immediately.
It's going to be a get out of jail free card.
They also are now proposing a quarter billion dollars in extra spending for educational and rehabilitative programs for these inmates.
And Kushner explained the core of this issue, the core of this total misunderstanding.
He said, quote,"...the single biggest thing we want to do is really define what the purpose of a prison is.
Is the purpose to punish?
Is the purpose to warehouse?
Or is the purpose to rehabilitate?" Yeah, all of those things.
That's the purpose.
I know what he wants us to say is that it's just to rehabilitate.
That's what he wants.
He says it's just to rehabilitate.
This gets to a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of prison and of justice.
There are three kinds of punishment.
Retributive punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation.
Those are the three purposes of punishment and of our prison system, to exact retribution for crimes that were committed, to deter and to rehabilitate.
But now we only ever talk about the latter two, and really just the last one.
We really only talk about prison as therapy, as though we're sending them to some nice, to Turks and Caicos so they can work out their problems.
We're talking about criminals.
No, you're punishing them.
Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, as Adam Smith said.
Criminal justice.
I talk to a lot of people in this field, in the criminal justice field, criminologists.
I kid you not.
I ask them, what's the purpose of criminal justice?
And almost uniformly, they say it's sometimes deterrent and to rehabilitate.
They don't talk about the retributive aspects.
Then I say, okay, well, that's criminal justice, huh?
That's your explanation.
So where does the justice come in?
Does justice have anything to do with criminal justice?
They say, oh, I kid you not.
I've talked to people who have PhDs in this.
They say, huh, I've never thought about that before.
I've never thought that criminal justice maybe should have anything to do with justice.
And we're totally missing this.
We're missing this now because our ability to discuss questions about virtue and morality and the moral order and the metaphysical world is so, so weakened.
It's become so degraded and it's decayed so much that we don't even know that that's a possibility.
There's another large push now on so-called criminal justice reform to treat 21-year-old criminals as though they are children.
They want them to be tried in juvenile courts.
21-year-old commits some heinous crime.
Oh, he's just a kid.
He's just a kid, isn't he?
I mean, now we have 30-year-olds living with their parents and refusing to be evicted.
So I suppose maybe that's the, maybe it should be 30-year-olds next.
They all say, oh, my brain made me do it.
This is why we don't punish people anymore is because we're trying to defer moral responsibility.
We say, I'm not responsible for my actions.
It was society.
It was my circumstances.
It was poverty.
It was a lack of education.
Or finally, which is what we've gotten to, my brain made me do it.
I just couldn't control myself.
Just my brain.
The random physical material synapses in my brain just made me commit the crime.
So you can't punish me.
Because that's true.
If materialism is true, then you certainly shouldn't punish anybody for a crime.
They have no moral culpability.
They could walk up and slit your throat.
It's not, how dare you punish them?
They didn't do it.
Their brain made them do it.
So this is the morally idiotic and practically idiotic aspect of so-called criminal justice reform.
Immorally, it doesn't make any sense.
It's totally incoherent.
Now we're referring, we don't call people juvenile delinquents anymore.
The new term is justice-involved youth.
That's the Obama-era term, which is ironic because they're explicitly injustice-involved youth.
But listen, if we quibbled about every word, we'd be here for my entire honeymoon.
It doesn't make sense.
It's morally idiotic.
It's also practically idiotic.
People say, we have too many people in prison in America.
Do we?
I don't know.
Is our crime rate zero?
Then I think we have too few people in prison in America, don't we?
There was that famous headline in the New York Times.
Fox Butterfield wrote it.
It was something to the effect of...
Crime rate continues to fall despite prisons filling.
Hold on, so you're locking up all of the criminals and the crime rate is falling.
Yeah, that's probably despite.
That's probably the word I would use to describe it.
Dummies at the New York Times.
So anyway, Tom Cotton opposes this.
Tom Cotton has basically exactly the view that I have.
We don't have an overpopulation problem in prison.
We have an underpopulation problem in prison.
We need to lock up more criminals and we need to stop pretending that people don't have any moral culpability whatsoever.
It is a recipe for social disaster.
Let's get to the mailbag in the remaining few minutes.
I don't know.
I'm going to have to ask the control room how many more minutes I have to get through these mailbag questions.
I'll try to fly through them.
The first question is from Evan.
Dear soon-to-be-shackled Michael Knowles, will The Daily Wire be live-streaming The Blessed Day?
Evan, you know, we were going to live-stream The Blessed Night, but I got such a negative reaction to my Valentine's Day promotion video with the short little smoking jacket and my dainty little legs that I didn't want to subject myself to that sort of Insulting criticism again.
So no, we won't be live streaming the day or the night.
So there.
So there, Evan.
From Spencer.
What do you think makes Dante's Divine Comedy stand out among the other classics of the Western canon as a work of singular genius?
What would you say are its most fundamental themes and what are the most important lessons we take away from reading Dante?
Since you've quoted Dante in both Italian and English, I figured you must have carefully studied the comedy at some point.
I look forward to hearing your insights on the poem.
So my basic insights are that it is so shockingly beautiful and it is so unified that this is what strikes me most.
You don't really catch this in the English, but he employs a scheme called terzo rima, these rhymes of three, that just...
Very quickly, the beginning of the poem, just listen to the sounds, if you don't speak Italian, just hear, There's this, you can hear those rhymes in those sets of three.
So it's very beautiful.
And that goes on for 100 Conti.
And also, it's all unified.
So instead of giving you my thoughts on this, I asked a close friend of mine, Catherine Illingworth, who is a Dante scholar and coincidentally was a TA of mine in college.
And I asked her for her thoughts because she's a real expert on this.
And she said exactly what I think in much better words.
There are three aspects here.
Universality.
What makes it stand out?
The universality of it.
You go from the depths of evil to the heights of holiness, and it touches on all things, seen and unseen, of the human condition.
It masters all previous art and literature.
Dante is led by Virgil.
Dante has drunk up and read and consumed all of the art and culture and literature of his time, and then he creates something original out of it because he's totally absorbed it and turns it into something new and because it's so beautiful.
The most fundamental themes are that human love is rooted in God, All of it, all of human love, the erotic love, fraternal love, love of your friends, love of the divine love, all of that love, from whatever you were doing on Saturday night to whatever you were doing Sunday afternoon, all of that is rooted in God.
You see Beatrice, a girl that wasn't Dante's wife, leads him to salvation.
Because he's following her through to salvation, to God.
There's the unity of the private and the public.
So the idea here is that the world will be orderly when people are virtuous.
It won't just become peaceful and orderly if you have vicious people or bad people.
There's a unity here of what you do in your private life and what you do in your public life.
Sometimes in politics and other works, we try to divorce those things.
You can't.
There is a unity.
There is a Catholicism, right?
There's a universality here.
And there's the relationship between love and knowledge here.
So for Dante, one leads to the other, and together they both lead to salvation, to a total transformation, not following a set of rules to being utterly transformed by divine love.
And some lessons from Dante.
Read a lot.
You have to read a lot of books, just like Dante did, so that you can absorb all of that, and it can really save your civilization and save your soul.
Another lesson is that grace is real.
This is an utterly graceful poem, and you should accept grace because it's the only goodness.
It doesn't matter how lost you are when you begin that journey, what age you begin that journey at.
There's this utter grace.
You see people in paradise who weren't always such great people.
St.
John Vianney said, not all the saints started well, but they all ended well, as you see that.
And that love is always good.
That's a third lesson.
Love is always good, but you shouldn't just settle for a little piece of it, just a little fragment of love.
You should follow it to its logical conclusion.
Beatrice, Dante, finds this girl when he's a little kid.
He falls in love with her, marries another woman.
She died.
He's totally in love with Beatrice, and he follows Beatrice.
Not to just devour Beatrice, to make an idol of his love for Beatrice, but to follow that love and allow that love to be ennobling and lift him toward the very heights of heaven to the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
We could talk about Dante forever and ever, especially when I'm hearing all these good thoughts from Catherine Illingworth.
Before we get to the next question, I've got to talk about another cool story.
So this one is going to be really fun.
This is a great narrative.
This is a good narrative story, an ennobling story, and this one's fun and you can listen to it in your car.
I'm really excited to tell you about a cool new show called This Sounds Serious, a new cast box creation.
It tells a fictional murder story that involves twins, cults, and a Florida weatherman.
If you're a fan of true crime shows and comedy, you will love this show.
This Sounds Serious is out now.
You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.
I really like this because I don't like things that take themselves too seriously.
So I'll watch that true crime kind of stuff.
It's always very fun.
You can't turn it off.
But I really like this because it's so self-aware and very funny about it.
It's the new podcast from CastBox.
This Sounds Serious, The Case of Daniel Bronstad.
If you love narrative podcasts, obviously I do.
I perform in them.
But if you're tired of all those serious storylines, check this out.
It pokes fun at the mystery and crime categories in a unique way.
You should download This Sounds Serious today wherever you get your podcasts.
It is fake true crime.
That's what I like.
We do fake true news here.
This is fake.
No, true fake news.
I don't know.
Something like that.
This is fake true crime.
Delivers big on both laughs and story.
Really funny.
First two available May 1st.
It is out now.
Check it out.
This Sounds Serious is a CastBox original written by the people behind Maximum Fun.
Stop podcasting yourself.
I never would do that.
CBC's This Is That and Panoply's Dexter Guff Is Smarter Than You.
Stars Peter Oldring, Dexter Guff Is Smarter Than You, and Carly Pope from Aerosuits and Elysium.
Each episode's about 25 minutes long, perfect for a commute or a road trip.
Go to www.thissoundsserious.com.
It sounds serious and it's really funny.
So check it out.
Okay, I've got only four minutes before we can get to my conversation with Allie.
She gives me pretty mind-blowing advice on marriage, whether or not I should run away right now.
I haven't gotten married yet.
I could still leave a Michael-shaped hole in the wall somewhere, but let's try to get one or two more questions in.
From William.
Dear His Holiness the Michael, a trend among liberal hit job interviews is to barrage conservative interviewees with a host of questions that are designed to misrepresent the views of the person being interviewed and put the onus on them to debunk an argument that they never make.
He cites the example of Jordan Peterson, who does Jordan Peterson answers that British interviewer perfectly reasonably, and then she twists it and tries to make him look like a monster.
Monster, rather.
Is it interviewing etiquette for the person who's being interviewed not to call the interviewer out for nefarious tactics?
Or would it be smarter to hold interviewers to their own standards before allowing the conversation just to skip to the next point without forcing the interviewer to concede both the tactic and the point?
I really, really like that.
Love the show.
Keep it.
Covfefe.
William.
Okay.
Yes.
So what they do, what the left does and the mainstream media do, when they're interviewing you, they basically ask conservatives, do you still beat your wife?
That is the question they ask you.
Do you still beat your wife?
Then any answer you give, it's not going to look very good for you.
They always do this.
So the way to do this now is to be a bulldog with these people.
I mean, call them out on everything.
Be very clear.
I've had many reporters call from Fox or the New York Times or whatever saying, I'm cordial to them, but I'm not nice.
I'm pretty open with my feelings about what they do, broadly speaking, what hit jobs they do.
Another way for conservatives to do this is not to agree to pre-taped interviews, because they always mess those up.
They always mix them up and make us look like racist, mean-spirited, evil people.
So don't agree to that broadly.
If you're going to agree to one, Make sure there's a live component to it or make sure that you're filming them filming you.
That's a real key because otherwise they're going to make you look awful.
From Tim.
Dear Rachel Maddow's estranged brother, does Ben pay you in shekels or coal?
Tim.
Well, Ben doesn't pay me at all, of course.
I mean, he hasn't paid me in a long time.
He did give me a lump of coal for Christmas, but I like to think of that more as a future diamond.
I think that that's really, you know, Ben wanted to get me like a nice big diamond ring or something.
And, you know, I will say he just sent me a wedding present and he got me a blender.
This is a true story.
He really did get me a blender.
And I don't know why.
I don't know why when Ben thinks of me and my future, he just thinks of very sharp blades spinning around very fast, turning formerly solid entities into mush.
I don't know.
But it's very nice.
You know, I like the blender very much.
From Kyle.
Dear patron saint of smug Catholics everywhere.
I've been hearing a lot recently about how the American Constitution has a somewhat Protestant foundation to it, but I'm not exactly sure what this means.
Could you discuss it further further?
P.S. Any tips on getting started with cigars would be appreciated.
Yes, you should light them.
That would be the first step to getting started with cigars.
Cutting them is good too, but lighting is probably the most important one.
As to the question about the Protestant foundations of America and the Constitution...
There's a little truth to that.
Good old Papa Knowles, who came over on the Mayflower, Grandpappy Samuel Fuller and the others, were Protestant religious zealots.
I mean, they would be shocked and horrified by the flagrant potpourri of their progeny.
So there is an aspect of this, and it manifests in a few ways.
That rugged individualism, that distaste for many institutions, I will concede that has some Protestant foundations.
I will point out, though, that America, the Americas, Have a Catholic foundation.
They don't have a Protestant foundation.
It was Christopher Columbus, a devout, wonderful, serious, devout, charitable, wonderful, brilliant, fabulous, terrific Catholic man, Christopher Columbus.
That's a Catholic foundation.
So the Americas broadly have that.
I think it's totally ridiculous to say that Catholics don't have the pioneer spirit or want to go and spread...
Spread the word of God and glory and freedom to every end of the earth.
That isn't true.
So yes, you can concede that there's a largely Protestant foundation in the United States, but the America's baby, that was the first one.
That was the original 1492.
Not a Protestant thing about it.
Okay, it's too bad because we've got some great questions to delve into, but sadly, we just can't get to them today.
I'll try to answer them.
Oh, I will point out, just before we go, one person who wrote in said, Hey Michael, I just got my Helix Sleep mattress and Bowling Branch sheets in the mail today.
It's quite possibly the greatest combination in the history of the world.
Thank you for the mountains of covfefe and leftist tears that I take straight to the dome daily.
You're welcome.
I wanted to get that little sponsor plug in there because I sleep on them and they are fabulous.
They are absolutely great.
So check them out.
They're really, really good.
I love them.
Okay, that's it.
That's enough for today for everybody who's on Facebook and YouTube.
If you're on Daily Wire, thank you very much.
You keep Covfefe in my cup.
You help me guzzle down delicious leftist tears, and I am mainlining them before my wedding.
So go to dailywire.com.
You get me.
The Andrew Clevenger, the Ben Shapiro show, questions in the mailbag, blah, blah, blah.
None of that matters.
Get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You're going to need it in my absence.
You are going to need it in my absence because I'm going to be there.
I'm going to have an ocean of mostly magma and lava in Hawaii.
But what you can do is try not to drown in the leftist tears.
I'm going to avoid big magma boulders and you can try not to drown in leftist tears.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with my interview with Ali Stuckey.
So you know Ali Stuckey.
Allie's been with us since the beginning.
Allie stopped by L.A. on her way.
I don't know.
She's such a jet setter.
She stopped by right before I flew out, too.
So we talked about the really important things.
Because after this, folks, the next time you see me, I'm going to be about 50 pounds heavier, probably sweatier, unshaven, you know, pushing a lawnmower in the suburbs somewhere, 10 kids around me.
I'm getting married, okay?
That's what I'm saying.
I got a little advice from Allie Stuckey on that and many other topics.
Here is my interview with Allie Stuckey.
Allie, it's good to see you.
Michael, it's great to see you.
So, listen, we're on a time constraint here.
Yes, we are.
Allie has a flight in about 17 hours, so you have to leave for LAX right now.
LA scares me.
The traffic is horrific.
I just, I'm worried and I don't know LAX and so I just have to make sure that I get there on time.
You know, I do this.
This is a, I know you're in town to do a Prager video.
Part of it talks about sexual differences between men and women.
Yes.
This is a sexual difference between men and women.
You think?
The airport arrival time.
Yeah, I go.
I was going back to New York for Christmas.
This was Christmas week.
I showed up 35 minutes before departure.
Not before boarding or just before departure.
I made it.
It was fine.
Plus, you know, you got that pre-check.
The pre-check is the greatest invention in the history of the world.
But you just never know.
And I feel like people in California are just kind of crazy.
They're just unpredictable.
It's very unpredictable.
It is also.
They're the worst drivers in the country.
Yes, that's the problem.
Sweet little Elisa does this too, though.
We'll be flying, you know, domestically, and she'll say, you know, Mac, we need to leave four and a half hours before we get there.
That's such a horrible impression.
I'm sure that your fiancé doesn't sound like that.
Wait, you mean it's horrible like it isn't accurate?
No, I don't know how she sounds, but I hope she doesn't sound like an 85-year-old hag.
What?
How dare you call my fiancé an 85-year-old hag?
That's not from me.
I'm just saying.
You might want to nail the impersonation before you leave for the honeymoon.
Sweet little Elisa got very upset because I did this podcast with Drew, Another Kingdom, where I played all the characters in Drew's new book.
Oh yes, I know.
I listened to it.
Did you?
Oh, you're too good.
That's great.
So I told sweet little Lisa, I said, your voice, and by your voice I mean the voice that I have created for you, it plays a role in one of the characters.
She goes, oh, is it that pretty character, Jane?
I said, no, it's a rat woman.
It's a mutant rat.
Mac!
Oh my gosh, you're not writing your own vows, are you?
Because I'm a little worried.
We're going to get up there and then I'm just going to do the vows for her.
I do!
Probably.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, I know.
She's a saint.
She truly is a saint.
She really is.
She has a long life of suffering ahead of her, but it'll be nice for me.
Well, she knows what she's getting herself into.
Now, on the topic of marriage, you're a big marriage proponent.
You've been married yourself.
I'm a big marriage proponent.
What if I said I wasn't?
That would be really troubling.
Yeah, well, I'm trying to get advice from all corners here before I make this major life decision.
Well, you've already made the decision, my friend, so you should stick to it.
No, marriage is awesome.
It's the best thing that I've ever done.
Best, second best decision I've ever made after following Christ.
And I love it.
I mean, it really is.
I know it's so cliche.
Everyone's like, oh, you get to marry your best friend.
But it's really true.
I mean, what could be better than going home and being like...
I get to hang out with the person that I always want to be with all the time, the only person that I really want to talk to, the only person that I really want to spend time with and watch Netflix with them.
Really, what is better than that?
I love all of that, and I agree entirely with that sentiment, but I do have to ask, because I hear this, and I only hear this from girls, the marry your best friend thing.
Yeah.
Come on.
You don't think so?
I mean, he is my best friend.
Now, I love my other friends, but he is my best friend.
He's the person that I want to spend time with all the time.
But don't you think there's a categorical difference?
Like, when I think of my best friend, I think of, you know, going out and smoking cigars and, you know, carousing and, I don't know, doing whatever guys do, you know?
I guess maybe it is a girl thing.
I think of my best friend as someone who I can be my most genuine self with all of the time, and there are just no barriers.
That's how I feel about a best friend.
But, you know, you have a different mentality about that.
And it is true.
I mean, practically speaking...
Your wife will be your best friend.
You hang out with that person all the time.
You know each other backwards and forwards.
Yeah, that's true.
I can't get it.
When I just think of that, though, it's like...
No, you'll figure it out.
I feel very emasculated when I... Oh my gosh, no.
You'll love it.
Marriage is awesome.
Now, did you see, there's a new comment out by an AI computer scientist, the guy who invented that robot that looks a lot like a woman, you know, and it's like really uncanny and scary.
He says that we will be, his name is Victor David.
No, David Victor.
I confuse him with Victor Davis Hanson.
Anyway, whatever his name is, Dr.
So-and-so.
He says that we will be marrying robots by 2045.
I think that's sad.
I wonder, one, if that's going to happen.
I mean, we're already having sex with robots.
That already exists in 2018.
I'm using we loosely, by the way.
We're going to edit that out in post.
But that already exists.
Do you see the culture moving in that direction?
I'm only half kidding.
Do you think there will be a time when we're marrying artificial intelligence robots?
I think probably so.
I mean, we've already devalued and cheapened marriage so much to the point to where it's just this transaction where you do it for a little bit if it works out, or it's more like a contract that we sign it.
If you want to break it, you can get out of it, that kind of thing.
We've already devalued it and cheapened it so much that...
I have a hard time believing that humans have some kind of moral limit that we won't get to the point of objectifying or cheapening marriage that much to where we're marrying artificial intelligence.
I would love to think that we do.
I would love to think that deep in the human heart, something's just going to wake up and say, no, that's not a real person.
But I will tell you that if the robots are anything like they are in Westworld, it will be very, very difficult to actually distinguish.
That's true.
Because, okay, this is another gender difference.
Have you watched Westworld?
No.
My only experience of Westworld is the star of Westworld, the blonde girl.
Dolores.
Evan Rachel Wood.
Evan Rachel Wood started a Twitter fight with me.
She was angry about something I said.
Yeah.
What?
And so I didn't know who she was.
I said, oh, pretty little actress.
Okay, I'll respond.
She was being very mean, and I was being very respectful, and then at the end she said something else mean, and then she blocked me.
That's weird.
I'm kind of soured on Westworld right now.
Oh, those robots are mean.
I know.
I'll blame it on the AI. Okay, so here's a gender difference.
It's interesting with Westworld, and I'll try to tie it back into what we were actually talking about.
So season one, you know that all the artificial intelligence, that they're robots, all the guys in my life, all the people that I know that watch Westworld, we all love season one together.
Season two, I still like season two.
The girlfriends that I have like season two.
No guy that I know that watched season one likes season two.
And I think the reason is because they start to blur the lines between the robots and the humans to where you don't know anymore who's a robot and who's not.
I don't mind that because to me, I have a soft spot for the robots.
I'm like, they feel thanks too.
But all the guys in my life, they're like, what the heck?
They're robots.
I don't really care if they get murdered.
I don't care if they get killed.
So I just think...
That's interesting.
And I wonder if that mentality will be true when artificial intelligence starts infiltrating our lives.
If there will be a different perception between men and women of robots.
Yeah, I wonder about that.
Because women are just nicer and more pleasant and more nurturing, generally.
And men, yeah, they're a little colder.
They're not as nurturing toward babies or animals.
They're not very sentimental.
So you don't really sentimentalize a robot or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, we've already got so much of them in our homes, you know, the government spying on us through Alexa and all of that.
I'm so abusive to Alexa.
I am, like, if Alexa has rights in 2045, I'm getting booked and going to jail.
It's really vicious.
Oh my gosh, that's a scary thought.
Before I let you go, I want to talk about work.
Okay.
I want to talk, you know, there's marriage and there's work.
Yes.
Marriage is work, they say.
The...
There is a new study out that the number one cause of long-term poverty in America is not working.
I know this is shocking.
I know.
I didn't want to do that to you just before you're about to get on a flight.
What?
That is the number one cause.
So the statistics that are being cited here, 82% of people on food stamps are able-bodied adults.
I think it's 32% of them, 32 or 38, are working at all.
Not full-time, just part-time, a couple hours here and there at all.
The vast majority of them are not working one little bit.
How do we resolve this problem?
How do we...
You know, because we have this very sentimental view of it.
We say, oh, these poor people, we need to spend more money from the government, more food stamps, more whatever.
They're just not working.
But why would they work when they probably make more money off of the government?
They'd probably lose some money by getting a job.
When I spoke at UC Berkeley, we had someone that drove four hours to come hear our little panel and he was telling me his story afterwards how he used to be homeless and now he has a job and he has a lot of friends who are still homeless who don't understand why he transitioned from homelessness to having a job just because it's so much harder we had someone that drove four hours to come hear our little panel And he's like, "It is.
I make less money than I did when I was homeless." Oh my gosh.
And so I think it's abuse of the welfare system.
It really is more lucrative to not have a job these days than to have one sometimes.
It depends on what kind of job you can get, I guess.
I remember John Stossel did one of these, you know, sting things, and he went out and dressed up like a bum and begged for money.
And then he annualized his income and tried to figure out how much he could make.
And it was something like 90 grand a year tax-free or something.
It was pretty good, you know?
It's so insane.
So that's why I think, like, when Ben Carson has said this, and he's gotten, you know, he's gotten so much flack for it, that a lot of times poverty is a mentality.
Not in all cases, certainly not in all cases, but a lot of times it is.
And I honestly don't know how you shake someone out of that.
It's almost like Stockholm Syndrome.
Long-term poverty, it certainly is a mentality.
I mean, people, you know, in economies, people fall on hard times for a period of time.
But long-term poverty certainly is a choice.
Right.
Do you saw the story about the millennial, the 30-year-old kid?
There's a 30-year-old kid.
He has a kid.
You know he's a dad, right?
Oh, and he's a dad.
He's a 30-year-old kid.
He has his own son.
He's living in his parents' house.
They beg him to leave or get a job or do anything.
Five times they ask him, send him notices.
They finally have to take him to court to do it.
Is this a millennial thing?
You know, the millennials are the...
I mean, millennials, part of your Christian name, I believe.
Conservative millennial.
It's a much maligned group.
The millennials get a lot of flack these days.
Is it all deserved?
In this case, absolutely.
But I don't know if it's the fact that he is a millennial and he's really kind of on the edge of millennials anyway.
I think that you have deadbeats in every generation.
This guy is just a deadbeat guy.
I do think it's probably a trend in millennials.
We're certainly more entitled.
We don't know the value of a dollar as much as our parents did just because a lot of us didn't have to.
But I think it's something like a third of millennials still live at home.
Which, again, is not always a bad thing.
I have friends who are now very successful who had to live at home right after college.
But it's this perpetual adolescence and this prolonged immaturity that we see among millennials that scares me.
Those are the people that are voting for Bernie Sanders.
That's true.
I will say it.
It is a little rich of me.
I'm about to go on a three-day-long bachelor party to be talking about irresponsibility and carousing and things.
But, yeah, that does seem to be certainly the case.
I want to ask you, before I let you go, because you're an expert on millennials, you're an expert on marriage now, having done it, and you're also an expert on Christianity.
Now, listen.
I don't know if I'm an expert.
But you talk about it a lot.
I do talk about it a lot.
And you're a practicing Christian.
And, you know, I'm not going to pull out the squirt gun of Catholic holy water and spray you and try to bring you back home to Mother Church.
I've had enough potpourri on the show recently.
What I do want to know, though...
Evangelicals have been getting a lot of flack recently, too.
This week has been a rough week for evangelicals.
It's been a tough week for evangelicals.
And I want to know specifically, evangelicals are being called hypocrites for supporting Trump.
There was that big piece in The Atlantic last month by Michael Gerson, I think, how they sold their soul to support Trump.
I don't understand these arguments at all.
What do you make of them?
Because, you know, listen, I'm a Catholic, so we have a little more loosey-goosey view on some of these things, you know.
Yeah, that's a good way to describe Catholics, loosey-goosey.
What is your take on that, on the hypocrisy, the alleged hypocrisy of evangelicals who support Donald Trump?
It's only hypocritical if you're saying simultaneously, oh, actually having sex with a porn star while you're married is totally fine, and over here saying adultery is wrong, but I don't I'm not saying no evangelicals are doing that, but even Robert Jeffress, who has been quite a mouthpiece for Donald Trump, and I don't agree with everything he has said in favor of Donald Trump, but even he has said, you know, we still stand where we stand morally.
We don't think it's okay to have sex with a porn star.
We don't think it's okay to cheat on your wife, but he is the most pro-life president that we've ever had.
Moving the embassy to Jerusalem is a big deal to them.
Even things like deregulation and promoting capitalism is a big deal to Protestants.
Protestantism and capitalism really have gone hand in hand since the Protestant Reformation.
So we have these values that we feel like Donald Trump is promoting.
And I do think it's important that we say, hey, we disagree with a lot of the personal moral choices that he's made and we can hold him accountable for that.
But at the same time, we support him actually advancing our agenda.
Whereas under Barack Obama, we felt like there was a lot of antipathy towards evangelicals.
And so, we didn't support him.
Do you think there was antipathy?
Because he said that they're all Bible-thumping, gun-clinging ingrates and idiots, basically, and then he painted the White House in rainbow colors just because?
Yeah, maybe just like that.
I like a little bit of that, and Lois Lerner, maybe just a little bit of that.
So yeah, I think that's probably what it is.
I think they more see him, and I don't want to objectify him, but they almost see him as a tool to advance our agenda, and a useful tool to advance our agenda, more than they see him as a Ronald Reagan, some stalwart of Christian values.
I think we all know that he's no choir boy.
But I think it's important also for evangelical leaders to make that distinction and to say that.
And maybe they haven't done a good job of that.
But to say it's hypocritical, everyone is hypocritical.
Everyone holds personal values that probably differ from any politician.
I would hope so that all the people that voted for Hillary Clinton don't think that all the things that she's done in her life are morally okay.
Like kill that guy?
Right.
No, I don't know.
I'm not making any accusations or anything.
So I just think it's silly.
It's just a way for them, once again, to virtue signal, to say there's no way that you can either be religious or a good person and vote for Donald Trump.
And that's just not true.
Yeah, absolutely right.
Well said.
I've got to let you get out of here.
You're on CRTV. The stuff you're putting out is fabulous.
It's really, really good.
Where can people find you?
So my podcast is every Wednesday.
It's called Relatable.
You can find it on iTunes, SoundCloud, all of that.
Obviously, on Wednesdays, you have to listen to my show and Michael's show at the same time.
You can't replace it.
Simultaneously.
Yes.
Stream them.
Yes.
It'll just sound like this.
Yeah, exactly.
And people love that.
So you can find me there.
You can find me on CRTV.com.
Sometimes I'm on TV with Michael Knowles.
That's true.
We were on Fox the other day.
So yeah, all over the place.
Social media, you can find me there too.
What's your Twitter?
It's ConserveMillen.
ConserveMillen.
How millennial is that?
I wish I could change my handle, but I can't.
But you can just look up Allie Stuckey.
I think I'm Fabulous.
Ellie, always good to see you.
Yes, great to see you as well.
I'm going to run you down to LAX now.
Really good advice.
Conserve Malen.
What?
That is so, I want one.
I want a cool millennial nickname, like Cofef Malen.
Like all the millennial, you know, all the millennial companies are like, there are two words smashed together and random capitalization and all that.
That's what I want.
So while I'm on honeymoon, please figure that out for me because I already spent all the blank book money.
I need something else to pay for this honeymoon.
It's very nice to be able to say goodbye to you guys for the next week.
I'll be gone if I don't get swallowed up by sharks or lava or magma.
I will see you again soon next time as a much fatter, more suburban married man, hopefully with lots of children by then.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you in a week.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
