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June 21, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:10
Ep. 172 - MSM Pleads Guilty To 5 Charges Of Manslaughter

ABC News and TIME Magazine go full MSM—you never go full MSM—as President Trump forces Democrats’ hand on the contrived non-troversy at the border. Then, SCOTUS raises our taxes but foreshadows a possible yuge victory for American liberty. Finally, the Mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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ABC News and Time Magazine go full mainstream media, and you should never go full mainstream media, as President Trump forces Democrats' hand on the contrived non-traversy at the border, which I told you might happen yesterday when this news broke.
We'll get to that.
Then the Supreme Court raises our taxes, but foreshadows a possible huge victory for American liberty.
We'll get into that.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I also want to address something that I put on Twitter yesterday.
I was citing a Pat Robertson quote about how feminism causes women to kill their children and practice witchcraft and become lesbians and all that.
And I use that to refer to soccer.
This has gone internationally viral.
I have Tory members of parliament in the UK tweeting about it.
All these soccer journalists around the world.
We will get to that because it really brought up a few interesting points.
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Okay.
To begin, I sent out this tweet yesterday.
I actually must thank all of the viewers and the listeners who like soccer, which by my last count is 99.8% of them.
Because I have been on this holy jihad against the World Cup because I really don't like soccer.
So anyway, I decided to kind of have a little fun with this and use a Pat Robertson quote, the televangelist, the squinty-eyed guy, and substitute soccer for feminism.
So the quote from Pat Robertson is this.
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.
It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
So I substituted soccer, and nobody got this.
So I had conservative MPs in the UK tweeting all these international soccer journalists, and nobody caught the reference.
And I was really shocked, because every conservative should know that quote.
That is one of the greatest quotes in the history of the English language and of politics.
It is so funny, because it gets at this thing that I think conservatives should always play around with.
Which is you say a quote, and then people don't know if you're kidding or not.
And maybe you're kidding, maybe you're not kidding, maybe you're just having a little fun with it.
Who knows?
But the quote actually got me thinking.
Because it sounds so crazy, and Pat Robertson certainly says some out there things.
But on this quote I said, I wonder if it's true.
I wonder if there's any truth to it.
It sounds so crazy.
But let's just go through the points.
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.
Obviously it's not.
It is so awful and vicious to any woman who contradicts its orthodoxy.
Sarah Palin, Sarah Sanders, we saw that.
It's vicious, awful.
Cuts women off at the knees, says that women who don't, you know, become middle managers at the widget factory, women who choose to have children and raise them, that they're like fake women or something.
There was a feminist journal that said that Sarah Palin is just pretending to be a woman.
She's not really a woman.
So yeah, that's obviously true.
It's socialist.
Of course, we saw the Women's March after Donald Trump was elected.
It was all anti-capitalism.
We need to raise taxes.
We need to, you know, take over the means of production.
I mean, it was very left-wing economically.
Anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands.
There's one of the most famous quotes in the feminist movement is from Irina Dunn, which is that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
Certainly that's the case.
The most famous feminist play is A Dollhouse by Henrik Ibsen, where at the end the woman leaves her family.
He won awards from feminist organizations for that.
So that, hard to say no.
Kill their children.
America kills a million children a year.
A million babies a year in the womb.
And we have since Roe v.
Wade was decided by the Supreme Court.
Then it gets a little kooky, and you kind of wonder, because then he says it encourages women to practice witchcraft, you know, and he's, I don't know, could that possibly be true?
But then I thought about it, and the modern feminist movement has this undeniable connection to occult imagery.
The whole time it always has.
And I said, maybe I'm just imagining this, who knows.
Then I said, you know, the main feminist music festival, explicitly a feminist music festival from Sarah McLachlan in the 90s, is called Lilith Fair.
And it was all female performers and there was no men allowed, right?
And Lilith Fair refers to Lilith, a mythical demon who snatches away babies in the night and kills them.
So I thought, that's a little weird.
I wonder why they'd name it after that.
Then I went to my favorite website, the greatest website on the internet, Everyday Feminism.
I said, well, let's see.
If there is this occult aspect of feminism, I bet I'll find it on Everyday.
Oh, there it is.
I said, I wonder if...
And there it is.
This is like the third article on everyday feminism.
The headline is, Seven Ways to Use Spiritual Practice to Heal and Resist.
And I'll just read you the first two paragraphs of this piece.
I can barely get through it.
A handful of dried rose petals, an apple sliced with a spoon, piloncillo, and a few drops of sweet-smelling essential oils stirred into a pot of boiling water.
This is the recipe to my mother's love potion made to attract self-love.
A physical manifestation of love to pour over one's body while reciting positive affirmations.
She raised me with tons of remedios de la abuela, or remedies from grandma, from an onion on your belly button to relieve a fever, burning a palo santo to rid negative energy, to the belief that loving yourself is a radical act of resistance.
All knowledge that was passed down to her from parents, tias y tios, And abuelos y bisabuelos, among others.
Ancestral spirituality is a deeply personal practice.
It's a vague term that essentially boils down to the act of connecting with one spirit through but not limited to brujeria, herbalism, astrology, oracles, and much more.
Double, double toil and trouble.
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
I actually was shocked.
I did not see those connections.
But, you know, you read that.
That's like one of the main articles on everyday feminism.
You say, oh, I guess feminism does have this bizarre connection to the occult.
And then finally, Pat Robertson says feminism makes women want to become lesbians.
Who tries to make them into lesbians.
And that one also, I said, that can't possibly be true.
And then I read the Washington Post a couple weeks ago, where Susanna Danuta Walters, professor of sociology, director of the Women's Sexuality Gender Studies Program at Northeastern, and editor of a major gender studies journal called Signs, wrote a piece called Why Can't We Hate Men?
You know, maybe, because Pat Robertson put that quote out in a fundraising letter in the early 90s, and everyone said he was a total wacko and crazy.
And then, you know, leave it to feminists to prove him right.
Even if it wasn't right at the time, they say, oh, that's a pretty good idea, Pat Robertson, maybe we should do it.
So anyway, I want conservatives to know that quote.
It is one of the funniest quotes ever written in politics.
You should know it and recite it frequently and see if your lefty friend's heads just explode when you say it.
Moving on to important news of the day.
This has been a banner day for the mainstream media.
You might have seen this chyron.
Donald Trump tweeted it out.
Who says the media are biased?
Who says the mainstream networks are biased?
ABC runs a chyron.
It's a picture of Donald Trump on the screen.
And then the chyron says, Paul Manafort pleads guilty to five charges of manslaughter.
Paul Manafort, who was the head of the Trump campaign for like five minutes around the convention.
He was brought onto the campaign to help get delegates at the Republican convention.
And he's a longtime lobbyist.
And, you know, it seems like they've got him.
The Mueller investigation has him on maybe some money laundering.
Maybe obstructing justice, whatever.
They ship him off to jail.
Thank goodness.
Finally, our streets are safe with Paul Manafort.
A 70-year-old lobbyist is in the clink.
Thank goodness.
And so they put him there, and then ABC ups his charges to five counts of manslaughter.
Eventually they apologize.
They issue something.
They say, we regret and apologize for the false lower graphic.
We're investigating how this happened, why it was allowed on air.
We apologize.
I know why it was allowed on air, because these crazy lefties working in your newsroom put it up there.
They let it happen.
That's why.
Very, very strange, but not to be outdone.
Time magazine.
Trump posted its new cover.
And its new cover is an imposing figure of Donald Trump staring down at a crying, cute little illegal alien baby or toddler.
And it says, welcome to America.
Trump is like the wall himself, right?
And this is not the first time that Time Magazine has done this.
Time Magazine has run a zillion covers against Donald Trump.
They had one where he's looking into the mirror and it's a picture of him as king.
And it says, king me!
And this is unbelievable, by the way.
Donald Trump is the least authoritarian president in my lifetime.
This guy is constantly saying, can't do it.
The law says this.
I don't want it.
I'm just following the law.
I can't be an imperial president.
I'm not going to make this decision unilaterally.
I'm not going to force nuns to pay for abortions or contraception.
I'm not going to force this group to do this.
I'm not going to force this group to do that.
And they call him an authoritarian because up is down and war is peace.
They have another one where it's Donald Trump and it's his screaming face on fire, fire in the background, right?
That's Trump.
Because he's supposed to be furious and chaotic.
Not at all.
He's one of the least emotional presidents I've also seen in my lifetime.
He's the Teflon Don.
That's his new nickname from John Gotti.
Then, there's another one that they had.
It was Donald Trump and the Washington Monument was crumbling.
Because the country is crumbling under Donald Trump, except that unemployment is at virtually all-time lows and disability claims are way down, which means the Social Security Administration might be able to last more into the future.
And we have a...
Pretty booming economy.
And the IMF says that it's Trump's responsibility for that booming economy.
And we're finally taking a serious line on our trade deals.
And our foreign affairs are looking pretty good.
We've got North Korea coming to the table possibly to denuclearize it.
Other than everything going great...
Washington is crumbling.
And then finally they have the meltdown one.
This is the Trump meltdown.
It's come in, his face was melting.
There's no meltdown.
And this gets to a point that we're going to talk about later, this executive order that Donald Trump issued about the immigration separation at the border.
This actually may have worked out all right.
I said yesterday in the show when this news broke, I said, it seems bad, but we've got to read and see what happened.
Because it seems bad on the surface, but maybe, who knows, who knows how it actually looks.
We'll get to that too, because there isn't a meltdown.
Then, moving from the world of news media to Hollywood media, you have Peter Fonda, former actor Peter Fonda.
The brother of that traitor, Jane Fonda, he goes out and he starts tweeting and says that we need to rip Barron Trump from his mother's arms and throw him into a cage with pedophiles, see what happens.
Then he called for riots in the streets, called for 90 million people to come out, you know, start targeting politicians' children.
And you saw this kind of...
It's a radical call to action from Tom Arnold, too.
Tom Arnold didn't say any of the horrible things that Peter Fonda said, but it was that same, come on, you've got to do something, you've got to, come on, everything's terrible, you've got to do something.
Except all of the things that they're all screaming about now were happening under Barack Obama's administration in much worse ways.
One thing about this news story, like the bright side of this news story, the silver lining, is that every single day more terrible stories from the Obama administration come out That make Donald Trump look like a Boy Scout.
This is according to the AP out today.
According to a federal court filing, 14-year-old kids under the Obama administration, 14-year-old illegal aliens, were exposed to long periods of solitary confinement.
They were found shivering nude on the concrete floor of jail cells.
According to witnesses at some of these holding facilities, these kids would show up with bruises, broken bones, which were blamed on the guards.
Under Barack Obama.
Here's some testimony.
This is from one of the kids.
Under Barack Obama.
I don't know if I made that clear enough.
Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me.
Strapped me down all the way from your feet all the way to your chest.
You couldn't really move.
They have total control over you.
They also put a bag over your head.
That has little holes.
You can see through it, but you feel suffocated with the bag on.
What year did that come from?
2018?
Wrong.
2017?
Wrong.
2015?
That's when that happened.
There was an ACLU report just in May.
There was widespread abuse of illegal aliens from 2009 to 2014.
All under Obama and the mainstream media didn't say boo.
They didn't say peep because they don't actually care about this whatsoever.
It is just the only cudgel that they can contrive and make up to attack Donald Trump because everything else is going so well.
So let's talk about this executive order.
We've got a little bit of time before the mailbag.
This executive order came out yesterday during this show, and he said, okay, we're going to stop separating these families.
We've got to figure out a way to stop separating the families and keep them detained together until we can figure out their immigration situation, either prosecute or file for asylum or deport them.
We know all of the outrage is fake, right?
We've just demonstrated that.
So my thought initially is, why would Donald Trump cave on this?
This is a winner of an issue.
We'll get to the numbers on it in a second.
Why would Donald Trump cave?
Why would he cave?
First, you have to find out what the executive order says.
As I mentioned, because that, you know, the devil's in the detail, so let's see what it says.
It says that the Health and Human Services Secretary, Kirsten Nielsen, will have custody of families during criminal proceedings and asylum adjudication.
So instead of putting the parents with the U.S. Marshals and the kids with Health and Human Services, this executive order says, Health and Human Services, oh, I'm sorry, Department of Homeland Security, is going to have custody of these families during criminal proceedings.
But the question is, which is it?
Is this criminal detention or is this some kind of government program, welfare program to detain people who have nowhere else to go?
Which is it?
Because the law says you can't put the kids in jail and if you let the parents go and you don't keep them held in custody, then they'll just go and they won't show up to their asylum hearings or their criminal hearings.
So then the executive order tells Secretary of Defense Mattis to construct facilities or use existing facilities to house them too.
So now we've got multiple agencies, federal agencies, coming in here to talk about where we're going to house them.
And then the order urges Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prioritize all of these proceedings so that the Flores Consent Decree, which says that the kids can't be in jail for more than 20 days, that might not even matter if we can get all of this taken care of within 20 days.
The bill that Ted Cruz proposed would have done the same thing.
It would say, let's take care of this within 14 days, then you don't need to worry about Flores.
Okay, let's see if that happens.
You know, actually, that last part concerning Jeff Sessions is a lot of the good stuff from Ted Cruz's bill is just in this executive order.
But can it...
We know from public polling that this is what most people want.
Almost the majority of Americans, mid-40s, 44% or so, 42%, say that they want the families to be detained together but not released.
Detained together and then we kick them out of the country because it's a crime to come into this country.
Also, in the executive order, when Donald Trump was announcing it, he said, while it's consistent with the law and where appropriate, we will enforce these things.
But that isn't consistent with the law.
You can't jail the kids and you can't let the parents go.
They've committed a crime.
You can't just let them into the country.
You have borders or you don't have a country.
So...
On the one hand, this may mean that the executive order does nothing.
Where consistent with the law and when appropriate, which is 0% of the time, might do nothing.
But the thing that it did do, and I witnessed this myself on Kamala Harris' Twitter account, is it forced Democrats' hand.
It forced them to show what they really think about immigration.
And when it comes to Kamala Harris, it was hilarious the way that it happened.
So Kamala Harris tweets out at the, I think it was 11-15, 11.15 in the morning, Pacific Time.
She tweets out, this administration must end the zero-tolerance policy, which has created this crisis.
It can be reversed by the president right now.
So then Donald Trump said, okay.
Okay, that's fine.
There's the executive order.
We're not going to separate them anymore.
There you go.
That's what you get.
So then, right after he does that, we're talking not even four hours later, after she sent that first tweet, she goes, this executive order doesn't fix the crisis.
Indefinitely detaining children with their families in camps is inhumane and will not make us safe.
What?
What are you...
You just...
Did you read your Twitter account from four hours ago when you said, we need to keep the families together?
Keep the families together.
Separating the families is inhumane.
Then four hours later she says, keeping the families together is inhumane.
So what...
What are you...
Do you want to go back to the other one?
Because we can, that's fine.
That's why we just rip up the executive order, go back to the...
But something tells me, something tells me that even if we did that, then she would just go back and say, separating families is inhumane.
Because what do they want?
They want open borders.
That's all they want.
Why do they want open borders?
Because every day...
We arrest 1,000 people crossing the border illegally.
Who knows how many are coming over?
We know that those illegal aliens are more likely to identify with the Democrat Party by several multiples.
And we know that even after staying in the country for a long time, the children of immigrants and the grandchildren of immigrants are very, very likely to vote for Democrats.
Between 3 and 8.75 times more likely to vote for Democrats than for Republicans.
So what the Democrats want is to open up those borders, flood the country with illegal aliens, so that at least one or two generations of the future, they're importing their own voters and they'll make the Republicans electorally extinct.
That's just what the social science data bear out.
So Trump forced their hand, right?
Because she looks ridiculous.
She made herself a laughingstock.
She said, I demand this.
He said, fine.
I'll call your bluff.
I'll give it to you.
She says, oh, I don't really want that.
Right, you don't want that because you want open borders.
This is why the executive order seems bad, but really it could be a big win, especially if it doesn't actually affect policy, which it certainly cannot, because what it actually instructs the government to do is illegal, so it can't really do that.
But this is why it might turn out great.
Illegal immigration is a huge loser for Democrats.
It is a big, big loser with a capital L. 19%, according to a YouGov poll that just came out, only 19% of Americans favor catch and release.
81% of Americans despise the policy of catch and release, which was our prior immigration policy.
We'd catch these people and say, oh, well, we can't separate and this, and that's okay.
You just go, but you better show up to your hearing.
Not even a chance they're going to show up to their hearing.
The numbers get more interesting because 70% of Democrats oppose catch and release.
Of Democrats.
67% of Hillary voters oppose catch and release.
64% of self-described liberals, of left-wingers, of the left part of the Democratic Party, which is now the whole Democratic Party, oppose catch and release.
The vast majority of voters across virtually every demographic oppose We're for open borders, we're for open borders, just like he made Kamala Harris do.
That's a big electoral winner.
I think the Democrats thought that this issue, if they could contrive this fake crisis at the border, which has really been going on under Obama and they were silent the whole time, if they could contrive that before the midterms, that they would finally get any momentum going into the midterms, and then Donald Trump basically flipped it right back on them.
Really good strategery, Mr.
President.
By the way, if you look further down the line to Donald Trump's base, independents, 83% oppose catch and release.
Moderates, 84% oppose catch and release.
GOP, 93% oppose catch and release.
Among self-described conservatives, 93% oppose catch and release.
And of Trump voters, 96% oppose catch and release.
So it doesn't look like, as we feared with that executive order, it doesn't look like we're reverting to that anytime soon.
He couldn't because statistically...
Trump's entire voting base opposes the policy.
Very, very good.
Before we get to the mailbag, I do want to talk about this Supreme Court ruling.
There was a Supreme Court ruling came out today from the cases Quill Corporation versus North Dakota, and the question was on whether Internet sites have to collect state taxes.
Can states demand that Internet sites collect state taxes even if they're out of state, right?
That's one way that Internet shopping is so much better, is you can skirt a lot of taxes.
The decision's pretty interesting.
Some conservatives are angry about the decision, which will raise our taxes because it will allow companies to, or force companies to start charging state taxes on the products that we buy online.
But some conservatives are complaining because the taxes go up.
But it's actually a conservative decision, which is why it was 5-4.
And it broke down Kennedy, who's a little bit of a squish, Ginsburg, the big lefty, and then two staunch conservatives, Alito and Gorsuch, and Thomas.
I'm sorry, I forget, five.
So three of the actual conservatives on the court, Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas, who's probably the most originalist, they were all in favor of this ruling.
And Roberts, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, Roberts being a squish, Breyer being a lefty, Sotomayor, An insane lefty and Kagan, a fairly smart, still very left-wing woman, were all opposed to it.
So the old precedent would protect these out-of-state sellers from being required to collect taxes.
Gorsuch referred to this in the past as a judicially created tax shelter.
And the thing we should take away from this case is not that it's a good thing that we're going to have to pay more money to buy stuff.
That's very frustrating.
I don't like that at all.
But what we should take away is the health of the judicial philosophy of the conservatives on the court.
Originalism or textualism.
Saying that the law means what the law means.
That the words really have meaning and they don't just magically change over time.
The Constitution isn't a living, breathing document that sprouts legs and starts dancing on the desk, right?
It's a dead piece of paper with words written on it that have meaning.
Because, Justice Scalia said this to me, I had the privilege of meeting him a couple times before he died, and he said that the health of that philosophy is that if you're a good judge, you won't always like your decision.
If you always like the decision that you come to, then you're probably not following the law and following the Constitution.
But if you don't, if sometimes you're very upset with the decision you come to, but that's where the logic of the law has led, that means you're probably a pretty good judge.
And that's what happened with conservatives today.
So I think it's broadly a win, even though it's going to cost us money.
Sad.
Let's get to the good news.
The good news on this decision is regarding Chevron deference.
Chevron deference is this principle that on matters of interpreting statutes, the courts should defer to the administrative agencies to whom the statutes apply.
It's because the administrative state, the deep state, the federal agencies, have gotten so out of control.
There are so many statutes that the courts have basically outsourced the interpretation of those statutes to the The administrative agencies.
This is obviously anti-constitutional.
This is a really bad thing.
In that same time I got to meet Scalia, he said the great threat to American liberty was the administrative state, this bloated administrative state.
And Justice Kennedy just wrote,"...it seems necessary and appropriate to reconsider in an appropriate case the premises that underlie Chevron and how courts have implemented that decision." And Kennedy, you know, Kennedy's the swing vote on the court, but he's joined on to opinions that have talked about this before, like Roberts' Arlington versus FCC dissent.
He cites Thomas and also Alito, Judge Alito, who is then on the Tenth Circuit when it comes to Chevron.
This could be a monumental win for American liberty.
If the courts stop deferring to administrative agencies when they shouldn't, when those questions should be left to courts, that would totally upend administrative law and would be a big, big win.
America ain't over yet.
There's still a chance that we can survive.
Okay, I want to get to the mailbag.
Maybe I'll do one mailbag question just to give you a little taste, and then we'll have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube and get to the rest of the mailbag.
From Andrew.
Mike, I just finished listening to Ep 171.
What happens when conservatives begin to feel the same way as the left and their useful idiots?
As in, they would prefer to punish their ideological opposites rather than win them over.
I'm almost there, but don't really want to be.
Unlike their experience producing good policies, leftists are pretty good at inviting their opponents to join them in the mud.
Sometimes I feel like we should give them the terrible treatment they pretend to endure.
You spoke about this issue with your guest, the idea that we're comfortable and can't stand it or have lost perspective.
I do feel that a brief rash of face-punching would reconvince us all that talking is a very nice alternative.
Please exclude my last name if you address this comment.
Thanks.
My commute is consumed by the Daily Wire podcast.
Sincerely, John Smith.
No, I'm kidding.
That's not his name.
I don't even remember what the name was.
That is a great question.
So, you seem to have been on Twitter too much.
That's what happens.
Because the lefties do just want to cudgel us.
They totally want to just knock us over the head and...
You know, smack us on this question.
So they'll say, we don't want to debate.
We don't want to argue.
We don't want to talk to you.
We're just going to shut you up and no speech and heckle you and hecklers veto, right?
My rule on this is if you're on Twitter and you genuinely get angry, that is you doing it wrong.
You're doing it wrong.
Don't do it.
Let it go.
Do not punch them in the face as much as you might want to.
The way that you can convince people is by laughing at them.
I think.
The left is not doing itself any favors right now by screaming and whining and no, you know, and all that.
They aren't.
I mean, they're losing everything.
They're losing all of the ground they'd made on the culture war even.
They're losing their political ground.
They aren't winning elections.
They haven't been winning elections since 2008, really.
So keep up what we're doing.
Laugh at them.
Expose how crazy their arguments are.
And treat them like children.
You wouldn't punch a child in the face.
And they are behaving like little children.
You've just got to take a firm stand.
Don't let them get away with everything.
But you want them to get better.
You want them to kind of see how crazy their mania has made them.
And...
Alright, next question.
From Henry.
Michael, what do you think is a good response when people say that gender and sex are different or disconnected?
This is what I think.
That is absolutely proved over and over again.
That's it.
It's just wrong.
It's just ridiculous.
It's a way that the left has tried to make you ignore the obvious reality that is right in front of you, one of the essential realities of human nature, which is the complementarity of men and women, that sexual difference between men and women.
They just want you to ignore that, so they say, no, no, no, that's sex, but sex, too, is different.
What?
What do you mean sex too?
Yeah, no, it's like sex, but it's different.
But no, it isn't at all.
Gender refers to grammar.
There are gendered nouns.
So in, I don't know, in Italian, the word for soccer, calcio, is masculine.
It ends in an O. It takes the masculine articles, even though it's obviously a very effeminate sport.
Those are different.
It's just a grammatical construction.
They apply that to human beings because they want to pretend that sex isn't a real thing, but nobody's getting fooled by that.
We've got a lot more mailbag to get to.
Before we do that, I'm sorry if you're on Facebook or YouTube.
Gotta say goodbye.
You gotta go to dailywire.com.
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None of that matters.
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The leftist tears tumbler.
They're pouring out right now.
ABC News is so angry.
They're accusing Paul Manafort of five counts of manslaughter.
Not one, not three.
Five counts of manslaughter.
You're gonna wanna have this.
Otherwise, you're gonna drown.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
From Noah, the bigotry of low expectations.
I've heard this before, but I don't know what it means.
Can you give us an example?
And how does this affect a community at large?
Also, did I use affect correctly, or should it be the other one with the E? Affect or effect?
No, you used it correctly.
Affect is the verb when you are going to affect something.
Effect is the noun, the effect of something that you have affected.
But affect can also be the condescending tone that I'm putting on right now, which is also a noun.
Ha!
It's a little confusing, but you can hopefully keep it together.
The soft bigotry of low expectations is a phrase coined during the Bush era, and it refers to that really nice bigotry, you know, when basically people suggest...
That if you're...
Liberals do this all the time, especially when it comes to education.
They suggest that, you know, minority students, people from ethnic minorities or poor communities, they couldn't possibly be as successful or as smart or as educated as all those rich white people over there.
So they say, lower the standards.
Let's just...
Maybe we should lower the standards for them because, you know...
Oh, good.
You got a D. Oh, good.
Because of your skin color, you could never get an A. Oh, good, good, good.
And it's just awful.
It's so insidious because it's pretending to be nice, but it's really, really wicked.
The conservative stance, broadly, is to treat people like they're people, like they have dignity and Self-respect, or at least they should, and they should do it for themselves.
But the soft bigotry of low expectations, oh, those minority people, they can't, they could never work.
They could never be successful.
Let's give them handouts.
Let's just, isn't that better for, that's nice.
Aren't I nice?
And don't forget to vote for me.
Isn't this, aren't I nice?
I'm a good person, aren't I? Yeah, but don't forget to vote.
That's the soft bigotry of low expectations.
It's really, really awful, and one of the great phrases from the Bush administration to identify it.
Next question from Mark.
Dear reincarnation of Liam Neeson in Gangs of New York.
I've never gotten that one before.
That is totally new.
And whoever came up with that, I will find you.
And I will kill you.
First, thank you for your best man speech advice a few weeks ago.
I ended up giving the best speech.
I'm glad that worked out.
That was probably three weeks ago at this point.
I want to know what has happened to art.
How did we go from Botticelli, Tolstoy, and Chopin to the muck we have now?
How is it that the most popular art of the age has gone from something that could be described as being touched by the divine to Beyoncé mumble-rapping expletives?
All the best, Mark.
World War I. That's the answer.
World War I. Also, the triumph of individualism in Western culture, which is sort of tied to that, but it had been building since the Renaissance or since the 16th century.
Even before that, World War I is the answer.
It's when Europe just destroyed itself.
Yeats, William Butler Yeats, the last of the great poets, wrote about this in the poem, The Second Coming.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Anarchy is loosed upon the world.
What rough beast is this slouching toward Bethlehem to be born?
The chaos that occurred after World War II. I believe he wrote that in 1919.
Part of the issue here is that everything had been done.
There was this total breakdown after the World War where everything had been done.
All of the great, beginning in the 16th century or really before that, all the way through the modern era to World War I, everything had been done and then Europe destroyed itself and everything was in rubble and everything was dead and awful.
It had run out.
It had run out of steam.
And so the artists at this era, in 1914 there were some new things that were happening that were beginning to start.
World War II ended that.
It radically...
It changed the world.
It ended Europe.
And so artists responded to that in three ways.
They started mocking the old beauty, sort of parody or satire of the old beautiful things.
They started deconstructing it down to its foundation.
You see a lot of fundamentalism come up in this period, artistic fundamentalism.
And then you had destruction.
Not just deconstruction, but destruction.
Destructing the idea of art itself.
Hemingway had a...
By the way, I can't claim originality on those points.
Jacques Barzin writes about that beautifully in From Dawn to Decadence.
Ernest Hemingway had a line about this at the time.
I think he wrote this in 1925.
The age demanded that we sing and cut away our tongue.
The age demanded that we flow and hammered in the bung.
The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants.
And in the end, the age was handed the sort of stuff that it demanded.
And that sums it up.
Hemingway was so much an icon of that period of time that really began this decay, and he was produced by it.
He had gone through this experience of the First World War, and it changed everything.
And where you see the breakdown of Beyonce and mumbling all these...
Expletive-filled rap lyrics.
I forgot to mention her in that feminism bit, because she's the old goddess Beyonce and the divine goddess.
Okay, consider that too.
But how do we get to that?
Because there was this movement called Dadaism, which really sums it all up.
All of those things that the artists did to react to World War I and the death of their culture come up in Dadaism.
From Dada number three, quote, I don't even want to know that any man lived before me.
And that's what they're saying.
Dada, this artistic, this anti-artistic movement, the word comes from the French for baby talk, Dada.
There's this obsessive, mischievous quality to it.
It's like the old joke, how many surrealist poets does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Fish.
Fish.
That's art.
That's what art had become, right?
You've gone from Botticelli to this madness and this breakdown.
And the premise of it, the premise of all of this, is that society is mad.
How else could you go through the experience of World War I without concluding that society is mad?
That some random terrorist in Serbia shoots the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
And this launches a series of events that led for German militarism to try to take over the continent.
And you get mired down in this stalemate, this Western Front, for four years of just Europe ripping each other to shreds, just blood and guts and mayhem pouring out of the continent.
Because of this king talking to this king.
And, you know, the Kaiser would write to Tsar Nicholas and say, Dear Nicky, isn't this so strange?
You know, You'd have to conclude that the society is mad.
This comes in the wake also of Nietzsche, who says God is dead.
The belief in the spiritual elements that have animated Western culture all breaks down.
No sense, no logic, no communication.
And that defines our art today.
There's no sense to it.
It's all just babble.
It's all babble and it's all neo-Dada.
We're just getting the artistic children of the Dada movement.
And so you might have been hoping that I could say, well, don't worry, we're going to get Chopin back any time now.
Oh yeah, Bach should be coming around pretty soon.
I don't see it.
The Holy Spirit animates society at various points in history.
You see it.
How on earth did, after ages of total artistic death, did Dante come out?
How did these people just pop up?
How did parts of spiritual and cultural renewal come out of nowhere?
Well, you know, these things can happen, but you've got to go through a lot of darkness since then, and you can't really predict when it's going to happen.
So don't hold your breath waiting for Bach.
He's not coming back soon, my friend.
Sorry to say.
Let's get one or two more before we have to go.
From Spencer.
Oh, Hawaiian buccaneer of Sicilian descent Knowles, you rightly describe many leftists and even some conservatives as being lightly educated.
I love that phrase.
But in a time when interest in the past seems to be at an all-time low and means for instant gratification exist everywhere in abundance, how and why should people go about making themselves more than just lightly educated?
Would you prescribe a specific curriculum of essential books to read?
If so, what are some of the books that you would include in it?
Spencer, P.S. Today is my birthday.
Happy birthday.
Except, you probably wrote that a few days ago, so it's not your birthday anymore.
Sorry.
The...
Lightly educated phrase is as much a self-indictment as it is an indictment of all of culture.
Because it's not just that certain people are stupid and don't read.
It's that our education system has utterly failed.
It has been utterly hollowed out.
And so even if you go to a great school, I went to a great high school, I went to a great college, you know, brand name and all, but they've been hollowed out.
They aren't what they used to be.
Donald Kagan, the great ancient Greek historian, former dean of Yale College, said...
This was decades ago.
He said, you can still get an education at Yale, but you don't have to to graduate.
And then a few years later, he said, I'm not even sure if you can anymore.
And that's at the elite universities.
So this isn't, I don't mean to say, you know, I'm so smart and you're so stupid.
That certainly isn't the case.
Our culture is in the midst of just a period of total ignorance and unculturation.
So what you have to do is go right back to that canon.
Go right back to the essentials.
I think all of these shows reference Aristotle every single day.
So you should go right back there to Aristotle and Plato, and you should read up through the canon and maybe...
Just make some time for that.
The reason to do it, because there's instant gratification everywhere, so you could probably just eat giant tubs of ice cream and watch internet porn and get a massage all day long.
We could do that.
We're at that point in culture where you could certainly do it, but your life will be better.
You'll be more of a person.
You'll be more conscious.
You'll be more connected to both the society around you, your past, your history, and God.
If you throw yourself wholly into culture and into reading and knowing about your history, it's very important.
And a lot of the political problems we're in are cultural problems and they're cultural problems because we're just so ignorant and uncultured.
So you can help fix that problem.
Start reading, pal.
Last question before we got to go.
From Jennifer.
Oh, this is a really hard question.
Hi, Michael.
I'm a Catholic college survivor of rape and was given Plan B at the hospital to prevent pregnancy the night after.
Is this considered abortion or a sin?
Thanks, Jennifer.
Man, I am so sorry to hear that.
I'm so sorry you went through that.
I hope you're doing well recovering psychologically and spiritually from that.
That's the worst thing that can happen.
In many ways, it's worse than murder to happen to you because it's such a conscious robbing of your liberty.
It so cuts to the core of what it means to be a human.
So I'm really sorry about that.
As for the question you asked, so I'll give you the answer as best as we have it, is Plan B, the emergency contraceptive slash possible abortifacient drug, is that abortion or is that a sin?
The short answer is we don't know.
You're a Catholic student, so I'll give you the Church's perspective.
The Church has not declared definitively one way or the other on this because we don't know.
The Plan B drug Which is different than some other of these drugs.
Primarily exists to prevent ovulation.
So it exists to prevent the egg and the sperm from joining together.
Now, there are two different definitions of abortion here.
The Catholic definition of abortion is intentionally, you know, killing a fertilized egg.
And the government sort of secular definition of abortion is preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg.
So the Catholic Church says that life begins at conception when the egg and the sperm are joined together.
The government says that life begins at implantation.
So the sperm and the egg join together and they are then implanted in the uterine wall and goes on from there.
We really don't know.
There was one study that came out that said that Plan B does not really work to prevent implantation, that its primary purpose and its primary function is to prevent those two from joining.
If they don't join, then certainly it's not abortion.
And there's really no way of knowing what happened in that particular case, other than maybe statistically over time, whatever.
I would say the thing for you to worry about right now is how to recover psychologically and spiritually from what happened to you.
You should not right now be worrying about the statistical probability that the sperm and the egg were joined but didn't implant rather than not joining at all.
This probably isn't the time for that.
Maybe you can come to think about that later.
Maybe science will shed a light on that later.
Maybe the church will discuss it in more definitive terms later.
But what you should do is...
Figure out how to put your life back in order after such a horrific event.
And I'll be praying for you, and I hope that it turns out okay for you.
Okay, that's our show.
I mean, that's a really tough one to end on.
I hope you all survive the weekend.
You know, it is the Clavenless weekend.
That affects all of us.
Just because you're listening to this show doesn't mean the Clavenless weekend can't affect you.
So go over.
By the way, we're about to start work again on Another Kingdom.
I know Drew's talked about that on his show.
He has...
We've basically started to finish that draft.
So we could get a season two at some point in the next 50 or 70 years.
So you should catch up on season one.
Listen to that.
You can get that.
Another Kingdom by Andrew Klavan is wherever fine narrative fiction podcasts are downloaded.
Until then, until Monday, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you soon.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Bory.
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.
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