Would he or wouldn’t he? We’ll analyze the question Democrat vultures and frivolous Republicans are so eager to keep in the headlines. Then, Chad Prather will stop by to help us out. Finally, how solar power threatens the lives of a billion poor people around the globe, why conservatives find more meaning in life, and what FDR’s unprecedented third-term power-grab means for us today on This Day in History.
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Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous executive agency overreach, or to take arms against a sea of crooked bureaucrats, and by opposing them before a foreign dictator and longtime geopolitical foe, end them.
We will analyze the question Democrat vultures and frivolous Republicans are so eager to keep in the headlines.
And we will then check out how solar power threatens the lives of a billion poor people around the globe, why conservatives find more meaning in life, duh, and what FDR's unprecedented third-term power grab means for us today on This Day in History.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I have to talk about it, don't I?
I tried so hard not to talk about this stupid, mostly media contrived circus of would he, wouldn't he, would he, what did he say, what did Trump say, it's the end of the republic, oh no, the president that's given us a booming economy, geopolitical stability, defunding deregulation, more religious liberty, more original, no, now he said something a little bit wrong, and now it's all over!
But I do have to cover it because even frivolous Republicans are really glimbing on and taking on the president with much stronger language than they seem to attack their opponents on the left who want to abridge our liberty.
So let's take it on.
That's fine.
Here is, you know what I'm referring to.
I'm talking about President Trump in Helsinki at the press conference with President Putin.
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Okay, let's talk about it.
Let's just play this clip right now.
President Trump, he's in Helsinki.
He makes a remark that maybe it wasn't the best said.
Here he is.
Dan Coats came to me and some others.
They said they think it's Russia.
I have President Putin.
He just said it's not Russia.
I will say this.
I don't see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server.
But I have confidence in both parties.
Okay.
Okay.
So he says, look, some people are telling me that Russia hacked everything, and I'm here, I'm talking to Vladimir Putin.
I don't want to call the guy a liar.
He's saying that he didn't do it.
Obviously, he's denying it.
And by the way, Vladimir Putin in that press conference sort of admits that he's probably lying, right?
He says, I don't trust the U.S. The U.S. doesn't trust me.
I've got my own interests at heart.
He's actually pretty blunt about it.
So President Trump makes a statement.
And people attack it.
They pillory it.
Do I think it was the best statement?
No.
Could he have said it in a better way?
Sure.
But, you know, he's the guy in the ring.
Is it the end of the world?
Absolutely not.
But you had these conservative critics, Newt Gingrich, saying it was the worst disaster of his presidency, worst mistake of his presidency.
And Newt Gingrich is typically a Trump supporter.
So this sounded alarm bells.
Other Trump surrogates, Paul Ryan, came out there and criticized it pretty harshly.
Trumpian apology for this.
Here he is clarifying, clarifying his statements.
I made myself very clear by having just reviewed the transcript.
Now, I have to say, I came back and I said, what is going on?
What's the big deal?
So I got a transcript.
I reviewed it.
I actually went out and reviewed a clip of an answer that I gave.
And I realize that there is a need for some clarification.
It should have been obvious.
I thought it would be obvious, but I would like to clarify just in case it wasn't.
In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word would instead of wouldn't.
The sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't or why it wouldn't be Russia.
So...
Just to repeat it, I said the word would instead of wouldn't, and the sentence should have been, and I thought it would be maybe a little bit unclear on the transcript or unclear on the actual video.
The sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia.
Sort of a double negative.
So you can put that in, and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.
I have on numerous occasions noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere in our elections.
Unlike previous administrations, my administration has and will continue to move aggressively to repeal any efforts and repel — we will stop it, we will repel it — any efforts to interfere in our elections.
We're doing everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in Okay, so, fine.
I mean, that's my take.
I saw the original statement, I thought, well, not great, but everything else has been good.
And then I saw that and I thought, well, okay, whatever, fine, that's fine.
Because I do like that the walkback and the clarification was basically President Trump saying, oh, well, I see why you misunderstood.
Yesterday was opposite day.
You see, yes, you must not have understood this.
In Helsinki, when I was talking to President Putin, it was the opposite day yesterday.
So that's it.
That clarifies it.
And then he makes a bunch of good points, which is that his administration has been much harsher on Russia than his predecessor.
And he's been harder on President Putin.
He's been much better about allowing the intelligence agencies to do their job and not politicizing his executive agencies.
What's really pernicious about this, because I actually was sort of cheering President Trump on when he was refusing to be backed into a corner, and I still cheer him on.
I really wish, if not for a few words, he really would have had an excellent performance in Helsinki.
That's kind of what caused some of this issue.
And there are some reports now that some people in the White House were saying it wasn't a great statement, but he shouldn't apologize.
Some people were saying, you know, he should get in front of this right away.
Whatever.
This is really a creation of Democrats and the media and the bureaucrats, led by now Mr.
Bob Mueller.
I mean, this is a total contrivance, and Mueller bears responsibility here for a few reasons.
There's this really pernicious aspect of the Mueller investigation, which is that it's twofold.
On the one hand, it's whether Russians hacked the election.
It's a ridiculous euphemism, a ridiculous phrase.
Whether Russians tried to interfere in the presidential election, as they have since 1917.
Yeah, probably they did, right?
The other one is whether President Trump colluded with Russia.
And what Mueller has done and what the media have done is they've conflated these two things so that President Trump is totally right to view the Mueller investigation as a political cudgel with which his opponents are attacking his presidency.
Why did those indictments come out just before the Russia conference?
Isn't that a little suspect?
That was obviously a political move.
It was a political move driven by Bob Mueller, and he deserves criticism for that.
This whole time, we've heard that Bob Mueller is above politics.
He's this figure, this totally upstanding guy.
Well, then why is he making such a nakedly political play to release those indictments right before the Russia summit?
That's on the one hand.
Now, who knows?
I take President Trump at his word all the time, but who cares?
The real thing that's bothering me is these frivolous Republicans who are clutching their pearls, getting so up in arms about all of this.
What do we know about the intelligence agencies?
What do we know about them right now?
Because we're being told, how dare President Trump not totally accept the word of his intelligence agencies and officers when he's speaking in Helsinki?
Well, look, sure, he's abroad.
Obviously, he should side with his own country over whatever someone else is saying or a Russian dictator is saying.
But on the other hand, the federal agencies, the investigative agencies, have become horribly corrupted and politicized.
What do we know about them?
The FBI under Barack Obama was used to spy on a political opponent's presidential campaign.
We know that happened.
What do we know from the former head of the FBI, James Comey?
Well, when we look at James Comey right now, he is begging people to vote for Democrats.
This man who's supposed to be the last guy that they told us was above politics.
And he's such an upright guy.
And he's an honest broker.
He is now going on Twitter.
He said on Twitter, quote, all who believe in this country's values must vote for Democrats this fall.
Former head of the FBI.
Does that compromise the integrity of the FBI?
Maybe.
How about the CIA? John Brennan.
John Brennan is now going on Twitter saying President Trump is a traitor.
He's treasonous, spewing all kinds of bile.
John Brennan, by the way, who voted for the Communist Party nominee for president during the height of the Cold War.
That John Brennan.
Does that compromise the integrity of the intelligence agencies?
Does that compromise the integrity of our executive agencies?
Yeah, I think it does.
It's not President Trump who's done that.
It's not President Trump who's turned his back.
Those guys have done it.
You know, President Trump and Rand Paul put it pretty well when it comes, in particular, to the case of John Brennan.
Here they are.
I think Brennan's a very bad guy, and if you look at it, a lot of things happened under his watch.
I think he's a very bad person.
Your thoughts on that, Senator?
You know, I agree completely.
I think John Brennan's completely unhinged.
And you see him now calling the president treasonous.
And what should worry every American is John Brennan was in charge of the CIA, the most powerful intelligence gathering, you know, group on the planet.
They can absorb every bit of information you can imagine, your phone calls, your metadata, your bank records, your visa records.
They could destroy any person's life.
The person at the head of that It turns out to be very much a partisan, a Trump-hater, and very much just someone who is, you know, a Trump-hater.
I guess that's the best way to put it.
But, you know, I really am worried that he was head of the CIA for so long, harboring all that bias.
Well said, gentlemen.
I totally agree.
So you've got those guys compromising the integrity of the agencies.
Then you've got how about Andy McCabe?
Remember him?
There are so many scandals that are coming out right now from the FBI, from political appointees over there, that it's hard to keep track of all of them.
But Andy McCabe not too long ago was disgraced and kicked out because he lied to federal agents under oath.
This was a major official.
How about Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the lover FBI agents?
Peter Strzok is testifying before Congress.
He says, no, those texts, the texts where I said I was going to use the power of the state to stop President Trump from becoming president, that didn't mean what you think it means.
Oh, you fools.
He looked like that guy.
That demon on that.
What do you have to do with me, Trey Gowdy?
I mean, he just looked so dishonest.
And now we know from his lover, Lisa Page, who this has been reported by Rep.
John Ratcliffe.
That she contradicts Peter Strzok's statement.
She says, no, those texts mean what they say they mean.
They look like that, which is that FBI agents who are investigating Trump, who are in the heart of it, who were on the Mueller team, who actually got fired when this became too public, that those guys were trying to use the power of the state to stop the Trump presidency.
That is a horrifying thing.
How about when President Trump met with Loretta Lynch on the airplane?
Former head of the Department of Justice under Barack Obama.
What about when they met and then just coincidentally Hillary got off the hook shortly thereafter?
President Clinton, I'm sorry, President Clinton.
Former future President Hillary Clinton got off the hook shortly thereafter.
And then what about Barack Obama?
We know that he's politicized other agencies.
He politicized the...
I mean, I was in some groups that were targeted by the IRS. He used the administrative agencies to target his political opponents.
So, okay, now conservatives are clutching their pearls on this.
They're saying, oh no, oh no, how could you ever question these bureaucratic agencies?
When did it become conservative to just blindly defend the bureaucratic agencies of the federal government?
Is that conservative now?
That's not the conservatism that I learned.
I don't think so.
There are obviously crooks there.
And it's really sad for the rank-and-file agents, because there are a lot of very good rank-and-file agents there, and their reputations have been tarnished.
They've been tarnished because they've been associated with crooked, bad actors like Peter Strzok, like Lisa Page, like all of these other guys, like James Comey, Andy McCabe.
Their reputations have been tarnished.
It's not our fault.
It's not conservatives who did that.
And it's not our responsibility to clean up the mess that was created by these crooked Democrat officials, by these left-wingers who were in positions of state power and the public trust and who abused that public trust.
That's not our problem.
And for conservatives, I know you can never criticize the intelligence agencies.
Give me a break.
That isn't Where's your love of liberty?
Come on, man.
Also, on this, why can't conservatives take yes for an answer?
We keep beating up the president.
He said this.
He shouldn't have said that.
Okay.
And then he says the opposite, and we couldn't take that either.
Just take yes for an answer.
Keep your eyes on the prize.
There is historical precedent for this, by the way.
People think that history began the day that they were born, or these days that history began, excuse me, probably just yesterday.
They did this to Ronald Reagan.
They did this to Reagan and Gorbachev.
Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus in the 1980s referred to President Reagan as a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.
Does that sound familiar?
Norman Podhoretz, a leader in the conservative movement, said that President Reagan meeting with Gorbachev shamed himself and the country.
Sound familiar?
How about George Will?
George Will, a previously, until recently, Republican conservative columnist, he said, Reagan went down like a punctured balloon.
Time flies.
For conservatives, Ronald Reagan's foreign policy has produced much surprise but little delight.
Just attacking him.
And then Newt Gingrich, whom I like and who had just recently came out pretty strongly against President Trump for Helsinki, he said in 1985 of Ronald Reagan, measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet Empire's challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy, will continue to fail.
President Reagan is clearly failing.
He said that meeting with Gorbachev was the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.
Guys, this has happened before.
It actually kind of makes you feel better about this moment in history.
When you think, oh yes, this has all happened before.
The same hyperbolic, ridiculous statements.
Ronald Reagan won the Cold War.
Ronald Reagan is the guy who tore down the Berlin Wall and freed people behind the Iron Curtain.
And to hear the things they were saying about him, one wonders if they'll be saying the same things about President Trump pretty soon.
The other side of this, too, and then we'll move on because this actually has broader implications for history and for the kind of conservative, what we conservatives should be doing day by day, what it means for us.
Do people think that there are just no stakes right now?
That it's all just a game?
I really do think some people, especially some Republicans, are treating this like it's all just a little game.
It's all just about manners and whether they'll be looked on well at the certain parties and cocktail parties that they go to or whether this old jockey for the next position or this or that.
There are real stakes.
This is about liberty.
This is about freedom.
Jeff Flake The future former Senator Jeff Flake, as he called President Trump, shameful, a failure, you know, just the worst sort of invective against him.
And he tweets this stuff out.
And then the very next tweet is, I kid you not, it's a picture of Jeff Flake taking a selfie next to a pig wearing American flag bunting, you know, and he's making a joke.
It says, what am I doing?
This pig can't even read.
Ha ha ha.
You know, smile for the camera.
Like, are you kidding me, pal?
Do you not realize that there are stakes here This is what he says, like, oh, I'm putting on my serious Jeff Flake face.
Mm-mm-mm.
This president's awful.
I want to take him down.
Mm-mm-mm-mm.
And the next minute, tee-hee-hee, look, I'm with a pig.
Hee-hee-hee.
I mean, it's like they're just, they're like failed Hollywood celebrities or something.
You know, it's just that they turn it on and off.
One wonders if some of these people have core beliefs.
If they realize, oh, the only way that we can affect liberty, the only way that we can increase liberty, the only way we can reduce government restriction, the only way we can achieve some modicum of global leadership and geopolitical peace is through politicians and through administrations.
And the Trump administration has been very good on this, so I'm going to support that because I want the thing.
I don't just want the appearance of the thing like the left.
I want the thing itself.
I want the liberty itself.
And you've got to wonder if these sort of frivolous conservatives like Jeff Flake, if they want that, if they have their eyes on that, or if they're just...
Big grin and teeth and empty suits.
You have to wonder.
But the people who are actually affecting policy, they're not empty suits.
And sometimes they misspeak or whatever.
We should give them a little grace on that.
And most importantly, when they come out and they apologize and they say, no, yesterday was opposite day, take yes for an answer, people.
Come on.
Goodness gracious, there are objects here.
And speaking of frivolous conservatives, I think there's a parallel here with the environmental movement.
There's a real parallel.
There's the same sort of mistaking the forest for the trees for getting your priorities all jumbled.
It reminds me a little bit of G.K. Chesterton.
He said that heresy isn't the promotion of vice.
It's the promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of all the other virtues.
There's a big story out today with regard to the environmental movement.
Bjorn Lomborg, who is the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, an environmental think tank guy, He came out and said pretty clearly, in no uncertain terms, that the push among environmentalists to make all energy, solar power, wind power, renewable energy, is very cruel to 1.1 billion poor people around the world.
And, you know, his point here is that it's very easy for us, sitting here in a world powered by oil, to say, it would be better if we didn't do that.
We should probably just power our cars on hopes and dreams and unicorn juice.
But for people who are trying to subsist, who are trying to live, who are trying to be pulled out of global dire poverty...
They need those tools.
And if we say to them, no, no, no.
No, no, Bangladeshies.
You're not allowed to use oil.
You know, these are people who could contract diseases, who could starve, who could live in poverty because of our whims, because we think that the environment is more important than people's lives, than people flourishing and being able to support their families.
They did this in the United States when the environmentalists pushed ethanol.
So they said, look, we're going to start using more corn in our fuel instead of dinosaur juice, instead of fossil fuels and oil, and that'll be better for the environment.
What could go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, what went wrong is that the use of ethanol drove up corn prices tremendously.
By 2011, which is not that long after ethanol we'd started really using it, The price of corn had risen from $2 to $3 to $7 and multiplied per unit by over 100%, and possibly over 200%.
Ethanol went from 5% to 10% of the corn demand to over 40% in the United States.
That has effects, and this is the case with a lot of leftist policy.
There are always unintended consequences.
When the federal government acts, when the government acts, it's easy to say, see, it's helping so-and-so.
How uncompassionate of you not to want to help the little Delta smelt anchovies that most of my fresh water goes to.
But there are all of these unintended consequences.
And in this case, you're talking about over a billion people Impoverished people around the world.
Wind, solar, wave energy comprises under 10% of electricity in the OECD. And the only reason it even comprises that much is because there are massive subsidies.
Just last year, $160 billion worth of subsidies.
Electricity is almost all, in all part, created through fossil fuels.
It's generated by fossil fuels.
To use the Bangladeshis actually as an example, in Bangladesh a study was done.
Electrified households, when a household got electricity, what that meant was a 21% increase in annual income and a 1.5% reduction in poverty every single year.
Not just one.
It's not like they electrify the home and they get an extra 20% of income and a 1.5% decline in poverty.
It's every single year.
That is a massive benefit, a massive help to their quality of life.
And yet, what we have from the environmentalists is, no, who cares about those starving Bangladeshis?
What about the trees?
What about the delta smelt?
What about those cute little anchovies?
No, forget those people.
No, those are like distant people who speak another language.
Forget about them.
The anchovies, they're right here in California.
This reminds me of when I was in Cuba.
This view, you know, where people just totally lose their priorities because I got back from Cuba and I talked to my lefty friends.
They said, ooh, how were the cars?
Ooh, is it nice?
Oh, that was...
Isn't that so quaint that they have old cars?
They have old cars that are uncomfortable and barely can still run because they...
Aren't allowed to have anything else.
They're not allowed to have, one, economic prosperity, and two, certain imports and products because they live on a slave island.
I even talked to these liberals that I met, these lefties at the Havana airport, and they said, oh, isn't it so nice?
Isn't it so nice that they don't need air conditioner?
They don't need it.
We in America, we need air conditioner, but those Cubans don't need it.
Yeah, they live in, like, sweltering misery because they're not allowed to have it.
Yeah, but you don't need it then.
If you think that's so great, how about you turn off your air conditioner in the middle of summer in a Caribbean island?
No, you won't do it.
It's a real othering, to borrow the left-wing term.
It's a real looking down at people like they're lesser, like they don't deserve what you deserve, like they don't enjoy what you...
like they're a different species, almost.
Oh, no, they don't.
We'll just...
they can skip ahead.
It's a total missing of priorities.
And you see it on the left.
You see it all the way from birth to death and everywhere in between.
It's the left that's pushing abortion, killing babies, It's the left that is pushing these anti-human policies of prioritizing the Delta smelt over human beings.
And it's the left who's pushing death with dignity.
We have to kill old people.
No, they're not having the best time ever anymore, so let's kill them.
Plus, they're using up a lot of medical resources.
Most of your medical spending in life is in the last six months of your life, so let's just pull the plug early.
That's the part they don't say out loud, but they do whisper it to one another.
From beginning to end, it's an anti-human ideology or coalition of ideologies.
And when you sense that, when you get a whiff of that, I think that's how you know that it isn't right.
In a theological way, it's where you see this sort of mark of the devil coming around whenever...
People are trying to really increase human misery that way in the name of compassion.
And just even in a more material and secular way, you can just see it.
When someone wants the anchovies to have a better day than the Bangladeshis, run away from that ideology.
That's not a good ideology.
Do I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube?
I was going to explain the meaning of life.
Can I explain the meaning of life?
Do I have time for that?
Okay, well, I won't explain the meaning of life, but I will explain why conservatives find more meaning in life.
There's a new study out.
It's a study out of UC, University of California.
It was a study that actually analyzed surveys from about 16 different countries, and it found a higher life satisfaction, and that conservatives found more meaning in life across the board.
Conservatives over lefties found more meaning in life and had more happiness and had more life satisfaction.
Why is that?
Well, let's just see what the studies say.
They found that conservative states were happier than left-wing states, even just within the United States.
And one of the reasons for that is that conservative states are less neurotic.
And having come from New York and California, I can personally attest to that.
That is very true.
This is according, by the way, to Gallup Healthways Wellbeing Index, the U.S. Census Bureau, CBS News, New York Times polls, and obviously presidential election results 2000 to 2008.
The study also found that happiness and finding meaning in life are more likely related to social issues rather than economic issues.
They're...
I don't use the term social issues because all issues are social issues.
If it's political, it's social because it involves more than one person.
But it is cultural, and that is the real crux of it.
It's cultural, and it gets down to the cult.
It gets down to what you worship.
That is going to determine it.
I'm not surprised at all that people who view life as sacred and who view...
The human being is having certain roles and certain teleology and certain purposes is going to find more meaning in life and be therefore happier than people who just want lower taxes.
That's the cool thing to be in college.
I'm a social liberal but a fiscal conservative.
I really don't care about culture at all, but I like me and I like money a lot, man.
Puff, puff, pass.
I'm not surprised at all to find that.
This, you see it all throughout literature, you see it all throughout politics and history.
But especially at this moment, with the rise of the nuns, the people who don't affiliate with any religion, which is taking place almost entirely in the Democratic Party and on the left wing of the political spectrum, you're seeing a simultaneous rise, almost one for one, in suicides, in depression.
I'm not saying that that's a causation, but I am saying that those two things are That they're happening at the same time, and it's hard to imagine that they don't have some relationship to one another.
Of course it makes sense.
If you really believe, as prominent left-wingers are trying to tell us, and has become a sort of mainstream view among a major political party, if you really believe that life has no purpose, you have no inherent dignity, you're a random accidental collection of cells, there's no good, there's no evil, there's no love, there's no joy, it's all just a trick.
It's all just an illusion.
And the only reason, the only momentum you have to keep going is pleasure.
Just giving yourself pleasure.
You're not going to ultimately be gratified by that.
When the pleasure turns off, then you're going to want to turn off too.
It is a horribly dystopic and distressing way to live through life.
And conservatives don't have that.
Conservatives are buttressed against that, one, because conservatives tend to be more religious, and two, because of the tradition.
Conservatives tend to be more traditional.
And thankfully, even when bad ideas crop up and sort of pervade the culture, the tradition keeps you rooted.
As long as you do rituals, as long as you sort of preserve the traditions in a society, you're still going to be connected to that thing which has some sanity, which has some foundation.
On the neurosis, I noticed that my conservative friends, broadly speaking, are a lot less anxious and worried and nervous and angry all the time.
And my left-wing friends, they're pulling their hair out.
This is true.
You know, when the conservatives lose a presidential election, they're unhappy about it.
They're not pleased.
But they don't flood into the street and start burning down cities like the Democrats do.
They don't refuse to concede elections, as happened in 2000, as happened in 2016.
They just sort of move on.
They try to be constructive.
They try to channel their frustration into something better because they have a purpose.
You know, neurosis is a symptom of narcissism.
I say this to my friends all the time in New York and L.A., and they're shocked and horrified, but it is.
It's a symptom of narcissism.
It means that you're obsessing over yourself all the time.
People who are too obsessed with their personal health, what they're eating, you know, this month I'm a crypto-vegan, paleo, dairy, GMO, whatever.
It's narcissism.
It's because you're only concerned with yourself and how every little thing feels on you.
Maybe if I change this, you're treating yourself as an idol.
You're treating your body as a machine that you're worshipping, as an idol.
Don't do that.
You're not perfect, and so that's going to leave you not gratified.
But when you look outside of yourself, then I think you'll have much better psychological effects.
You'll have more happiness.
You'll find more meaning in life.
And the study, by the way, even looked to different kinds of happiness.
Not just quality of life, well-being, smiley, smiley pleasure, but also eudaimonic Like eudaimonia, the Aristotelian sense of really having meaning, of pursuing a good, of pursuing virtue.
You will have more of that because you're looking outside of yourself.
A man wrapped up in himself makes a small package indeed.
Look outside of yourself.
Conservatives are able to do that.
That's why conservatives are better at understanding different people's points of view.
That's why the left is much worse at understanding the right than the right is at understanding the left.
It's why the left will unfriend people on social media who disagree with them, but the right doesn't do that nearly as often as the left does.
There's a little bit more understanding.
There's a putting something outside of yourself.
Don't be a narcissist.
And it's very frequently people who accuse others of being narcissists, you know, of saying, like, who scream all the time, Trump's a narcissist!
You're, you know, getting people's faces really angrily.
I think they have the problem, don't they?
Because narcissism has a meaning.
It has...
The excessive love of self, of constantly adoring yourself, looking at yourself all the time.
I don't think President Trump is a narcissist.
I don't see much evidence of that.
He might be crude.
He might be brash.
He might be self-interested.
But I don't see him as a narcissist.
I see him as too blunt and too connected to reality for that.
That's an important thing.
Your life will be better.
Rates of depression, rates of anxiety, people are popping all of these meds.
It's proliferating the culture.
Don't let it happen to you.
And the way that you can do it is just stop thinking about yourself all the time.
And really, I think this is just a rationalization because I don't want to eat all those healthy diets.
Like, you know, GMO, non-GMO and all that.
But really, I mean, really do it.
You will be happier.
And who knows?
You know, you'll...
You'll be happier both in a sense of meaning and in the pleasures of your life because you'll be eating a lot better food.
Okay, I do have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Now, I do want to get, before we go away to this day in history, but I'm sorry.
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Get those mailbag questions in.
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The real value, baby.
The Leftist Tears Tumblr.
This is it.
The Leftist Tears and Jeff Flake Tumblr.
The Leftist and Frivolous Republican Tumblr.
You need them because they're salty, they're delicious, they keep pouring out.
We're going to be talking also in the next week or so about impeachment and why the left really just probably can't impeach Trump.
And then we're going to need to make this like seven sizes bigger.
It's going to have to be like one of those giant gulps at the convenience store.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with This Day in History.
All right, in my last minutes here, we've got to talk about parallels in history.
I notice this about history right now, that all nature is but art unknown to thee, all chance direction which thou canst not see.
There are really weird coincidences that happen in history, parallels between current events and things that happened 100 years ago or 50 years ago, and things that happened 1,500 years ago, 2,000 years ago.
On this day in history, in 1940, FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Democrat president and king, was nominated for a third term for president.
Unprecedented, anti-American, a really awful move, and sort of set up some of the political dysfunction that we have around today.
Also on this day in history, in the year of our Lord, 64, Rome burned under Nero, under Emperor Nero.
That seems coincidental.
Yeah.
Isn't that a little weird?
On the day that the American Republic sort of caved on its basic Republican image and Republican self-understanding, and a president, Roosevelt, broke the example of George Washington himself, first time in American history, and decided, no, I will be a king until I die.
I will reign in this country.
That's also the day in history that Rome burned to the ground.
How interesting.
Under a terrible emperor.
So FDR, FDR is lionized because he faced difficult challenges to World War II and the Great Depression.
And he ably handled World War II, and he ineptly handled the Great Depression.
Now, it's difficult to prove a negative, but it's quite clear there have been plenty of economic studies done, one recently out of UCLA, to show why the Great Depression was so prolonged, what is such a strange event.
They didn't recover very quickly because of the wage controls that FDR was instituting.
At one point, I believe, FDR set the price of gold because of his favorite number, his lucky number.
He just picked it.
That is not good.
It's such horrific interference into the economy that it prolonged it for a decade.
But he's lionized because he said, well, the country could have collapsed if not for him.
I can't prove a negative, but I can point to clear economic indicators.
That he prolonged the Depression.
But that isn't the real problem with Roosevelt.
The problem is that he spit in the tradition of George Washington and all of Washington's successors and created this American monarchy.
He was the American monarch.
FDR was a lifelong politician.
He ran for New York State Senate at 29 years old.
Then he was governor of New York.
Then he was elected president in 1932.
But He decided to run for a third term, unprecedented in 1940, ostensibly under the guise of patriotism.
war was launching in Europe and he felt that it would be unpatriotic to have a normal presidential election cycle while the war was going on in Europe.
I don't know if that's really true.
Has that ever happened in other wars in the United States?
The U.S. had fought plenty of wars before that.
World War I, Spanish-American War, Civil War.
Is that the War of 1812?
Did we really start practically suspending presidential elections or at least ignoring the custom of George Washington because of that?
No.
It's a ridiculous excuse and you know it's a ridiculous excuse because of 1940.
He ran again for president a fourth time in 1944 and was elected, although at that point he was a thousand years old and died in office.
But he didn't need to run in 1944.
The war was already basically over.
Rome had been liberated.
The Allies had landed successfully at D-Day.
Paris had been liberated.
The Japanese had been routed out of Burma.
The war was going very well, but people don't look at that.
They say, oh, how patriotic.
He was just defending his country in the war.
Nonsense.
This guy was a real threat to democracy.
He pushed through a lot of anti-constitutional programs.
He tried to pack the courts.
I mean, he really tried to, and in many cases successfully, subverted our constitutional system of government.
That's a real threat of liberty, and that's what I'm talking about.
When the left, certainly...
But also when frivolous conservatives start attacking Trump because he used the wrong word in Helsinki, because he didn't speak with Reagan-like eloquence when he was talking to the Russian dictator.
And by the way, when Ronald Reagan spoke with Reagan-like eloquence to the Russian dictator, they said the same mean things about him, and they said the same pointed things about him.
You've got to keep your eye on the prize.
Where does the threat to liberty lie?
Does the threat to liberty lie from President Trump saying a couple wrong words on cameras and before some dictator that Americans have said plenty of nice things about before, that George Bush said nice things about, that Barack Obama said nice things about, and deferred to in many foreign affairs?
Is that where the threat to liberty lies, or does the threat to liberty lie somewhere else?
In a bureaucracy, a federal bureaucracy, executive agencies...
Led at times by crooked figures in the FBI and CIA where those agencies are overstepping their constitutional bounds and in some cases trying to overturn a presidential election where you've got a commission, a special counsel that drops indictments strategically timed to upset international relations, basically unaccountable decisions.
Special counsel and investigation.
The man with more power in the world probably than the president.
Where does the threat to liberty lie?
Where does the threat to our constitutional system lie?
It doesn't lie in a couple strange words from a guy who's known for using strange words, but who otherwise is preserving liberty.
It lies elsewhere.
It's very easy to just throw stones and attack and try to always be in the popular position.
But that's not the adult thing to do.
It's a childish thing to do.
You've got to preserve liberty.
Would he or wouldn't he or would he or that?
Who cares?
Take yes for an answer.
Keep pursuing liberty and try to prevent tyranny in America where you can or else we're going to end up like what happened in Nero's Rome.
On that happy note, get your mailbag questions in for tomorrow so that we can answer every single one of them.
I know we've been running a little bit late recently, so I'm going to have to speed through them tomorrow, get as many answers in as we can.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia 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.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
