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Aug. 29, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:49
Ep. 209 - America’s Favorite Pagan Orgy

This week, 70,000 weirdos will descend on the Nevada desert to bump uglies, roll around in filth, and worship Moloch. Then, we explore why everybody is suddenly transgender and blame our debauched sexual culture on British royalty. Finally, a primary night recap, as CNN fills our leftist tears tumblers to the brim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week, 70,000 weirdos will descend on the Nevada desert to bump uglies, roll around in filth, and worship Moloch.
We will analyze how millennials' favorite pagan orgy became America's most popular religious event.
Then we will explore why everybody is suddenly transgender.
Maybe me included.
Maybe I really am Rachel Maddow.
And we will blame our debauched sexual culture on British royalty.
It seems fitting, historically speaking.
Finally, a primary night recap as CNN fills our leftist-tears tumblers to the brim.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Those tears were a little hot.
I just burned my tongue.
They're still hot from last night.
They're hot from the Florida primaries.
So we have a lot to talk about today.
This is one of my favorite topics.
Bizarre radical sex.
So we'll get into that as well as the politics before we do that, though.
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Dirty hippie girls at Burning Man the next day.
Today, tomorrow, and then you go to Burning Man the next day.
So, today's show is going to be all about sex.
And this is not just your average orgy.
I was actually hoping, you know, they give me really terrible...
I've got to go to Hollywood Boulevard.
I've got to watch the movie about Barack Obama.
I've got to do this.
I've got to do that.
I just said, can you please send me to the weird millennial hippie sex ritual?
Can that be my one?
No, they won't let me go.
So I had to look at it from afar, but that's possibly okay because I realized that Burning Man is not just a weird festival, electronic music, druggie, dance, have sex with dirty people thing.
It is America's largest religious event.
That's not hyperbole.
They basically admit it themselves, and they get a lot of people to show up.
70,000 people will come this year.
What they do is indistinguishable from ancient pagan rituals, from even modern pagan rituals.
It all has a center in religious longing.
We will analyze all of those things because I think basically the people who are participating in it don't really know what they're doing, which is often the case.
For those who are not familiar with it, and also because I want to see very misguided hot young millennial girls dance, can we see a clip of the live stream from Burning Man?
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's this electronic dance music, oomba, oomba.
It's got this weird, vaguely Middle Eastern Indian-sounding music, and it's got what appear to be hot women.
Wearing weird clothes and like skull masks and animal masks and weird chains and stuff.
And like all perversion, when you hear about it, in theory, it sounds kind of titillating.
You think, oh, that might be kind of interesting.
Then you look at it and it's just mostly horrifying.
And this is always true of perversion.
I don't just mean sexual perversion.
I mean perversion in general.
And this is the case of Burning Man.
But when you look at it, if this were displaced, if this were in some ancient druidic compound somewhere, and you saw people jumping around to these weird beats in strange sensual attire and big animal heads on their head, you'd say, oh yeah, that's a pagan ritual, of course.
But for some reason when we see it at Burning Man, we say, wow, how modern, how new.
There's nothing new under the sun.
There's certainly nothing new about this.
If anything, the only new thing was Christianity, which managed to persist throughout the culture for, I don't know, what, 1,500 years or so?
And now we're seeing what happens when you pull that back.
So just a little background on what Burning Man is.
Burning Man was created in 1986 in It was founded by these hippie artist types over in San Francisco.
And it was a summer solstice festival where...
And this is where it gets weird.
The founders say they spontaneously burned an eight-foot-tall wicker man and a smaller wicker dog.
Spontaneously.
And I don't know where you spontaneously come across gigantic wicker people and then, you know, just naturally have the idea that they have to set them on fire or incinerate them or something.
But anyway, that's their story.
So they did that.
It was on the solstice, so it already has a kind of ritualistic aspect to it, a vaguely religious or spiritual aspect to it.
And then it grew every year, and it grew, and then they started doing bigger and bigger ones.
And eventually, by 2014, I think, the statue became 105 feet tall.
And they did it in Nevada, in the Nevada desert.
It attracted more and more and more people.
Now we're up to 70,000 people.
And it's taken on this decidedly spiritual tone.
So I just went to the Burning Man website.
They have their own Burning Man journal.
They have their own Burning Man philosophy.
I mean, every person I talk to, I say, have you been to Burning Man?
Have you been to Burning Man?
They'll say, no, I haven't been.
But, oh man, a friend of mine, he's like religious about it.
I know he's religious about it because it's a religious experience.
Of course, that's the whole point.
And we'll explain why, because I actually don't really blame the very misguided millennials who are going to this.
I don't blame them for going.
They're going because there's an absence of meaning in their lives.
We can talk about that a little later.
I just went to the Burning Man website, and I wanted to see what's this about.
What are they writing about?
What's on their blog?
This is what's up this year.
They're talking about participating in ritual, participatory ritual.
And this is the quotes that they have at the top of this page.
They say, consider the golden spike.
The golden spike.
Every year they go into the desert, they clamp down this golden spike in a ritual.
Quote, Each year, the recreation of Black Rock City from the empty desert is celebrated by driving a gold-painted length of steel into the playa at the spot where the Burning Man will stand, and from which point the entire city is surveyed.
Another quote that they have out there is, This may be the essential genius of Burning Man.
Out of nothing, we created everything.
And obviously, if that isn't religious talk, then nothing is.
That's Genesis 1-1.
I mean, that's the first lines of Genesis, or out of nothing we create something.
And that's what they think they're doing.
Obviously, they're not creating something out of nothing.
They're taking a bunch of hippies and getting weird and dirty around a desert for a few days, and then leaving.
And leaving a lot of exhaust and pollution in the air.
So it's not something out of nothing.
It's something out of something.
But that is the religious component of it.
And it gets even weirder.
They go on in this blog post because they have these different rituals that have developed over time.
They have temples.
They have an orgy dome.
More on that in a bit.
That was where I requested to go for my assignment.
I said, no, you're probably not allowed in.
And so it said, quote, This year the Burning Man will reside in a temple that is dedicated to the golden spike.
Every space and turning, the entire grid of our collective home, derives from this singular point in space.
Hold on one second.
I'll go on.
We will mark this spot with an omphalos, a sculpture that will represent the navel of our world, aligning with the spine of Burning Man.
This will create an axis that continues upward, emerging high above the temple as a gilded spire.
The sculpture of the man will stand directly on the ground, and it will be like every one of us.
He will live in a house.
He will inhabit a home.
Should you wish to visit him, you must get up close and personal.
Participants will witness the figure in intimate detail, including every beveled edge and compound joint our man crew has employed in fashioning its body.
Now, for those of you in my audience who are not very high on drugs already, this might not make a lot of sense.
Fortunately, I assume most of you are on a lot of drugs, you know, psychedelics or something like that.
But this is very strange talk.
And a lot of it sounds vaguely Christian or vaguely Jewish.
The temples and the man being the sort of avatar of spirituality.
You see these kind of religious...
But everything's a little off.
Everything is a little bit wrong.
Where it actually comes from, the founders don't grant this, but it's obviously true, is from this ancient druidic ritual, which was the wicker man ritual.
They say they hadn't heard of it.
They said it's blah, blah, blah.
But it's almost the exact same thing.
The ancient druids would create a giant man out of wicker, and they would burn him and set him on fire as a sacrifice every year.
Julius Caesar wrote about this in his commentaries on the Gallic War.
So it happened every year.
It had fallen into disuse.
Until modern paganism came around.
What they call this is an act of radical self-expression So you're saying they build this 100 foot tall man.
Every year it changes.
40 foot, 20 foot, 100 foot.
Call it a 100 foot tall man.
And they burn it.
And he's in different positions during the year.
There was one where they were in a real sensual position where it's clearly people about to get down and bump some uglies.
And other times it's this giant man.
And they set him on fire.
They call it a radical act of self-expression.
But it's not an act of self-expression.
That's an act of self-destruction.
That's an act of self-negation.
It's self-annihilation.
It's a sacrifice.
When we read the Bible, when we read ancient texts, Gilgamesh, whatever, you see plenty of people going out into deserts and burning idols and having weird rituals around them.
But for some reason when they do it, we look at it and we say, oh, that's so weird.
Who would ever do that?
Why are they doing that?
That doesn't make any sense.
And then people do this exact same thing on an even larger scale and we say, oh, it's a music festival.
Oh, it's, you know, it's just a bunch of hippies going out and whatever.
It's really, really strange.
So, it doesn't just stop there, though.
It doesn't just stop at the ritual.
It doesn't just stop at the history.
They have ten principles, a doctrine of Burning Man.
And here are those principles.
It's kind of interesting.
Because they seem similar to principles that we would have.
The first is radical inclusion.
So everybody can come.
Everybody's allowed to come to Burning Man.
The other is gifting.
So you have to give people stuff.
You can't use money when you're in Burning Man.
And then this is my favorite one.
The third principle is decommodification.
So we're saying no money.
Money is bad.
We don't want to turn anything into a commodity.
Oh, your ticket?
Your ticket costs $1,000.
$1,000.
But yeah, but man, after that, it's totally, there's no money.
These tickets cost anywhere from $200 to $1,200.
The parking fee is $80 or $90.
But then they say, but no money, no money.
And this is always the case with these things.
You'll hear people say, I'm sure the vast majority, if not all of the people who go there would say, this isn't religious, this isn't a religious thing, that's crazy.
But then they do religious things.
They'll say, oh, this isn't about money.
This isn't about commodities.
But then they pay $1,200 to go.
They don't even know it's happening.
We do this all the time.
We don't know when we're doing these things.
This is what makes idolatry so pernicious.
This is what makes it so dangerous.
You don't know when it's happening.
Then they talk about radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace.
This is a silly one, too, because so much of this is about nature worship.
So much of the modern lefty mindset is environmentalism, nature worship, we're killing the earth, whatever that means.
They say you have to leave no trace.
You have to commit zero waste.
And they really believe this, but that is impossible.
If you exist in the world, you create waste.
And it's obviously absurd.
You have 70,000 people coming out there on airplanes, planes, trains, and automobiles, driving, doing a bunch of drugs.
These things don't cost nothing to do.
They expel a lot of carbon dioxide.
They expel pollutants into the environment.
But still, they pretend.
There's this mythology of it all.
Then it says participation.
And then the last one is immediacy.
They say, no idea.
Can substitute for this experience.
And even here is a very important religious point.
Someone asked the other day in the mailbag about Gnosticism.
The idea that there's a secret knowledge that leads to salvation.
And Gnosticism is a heresy because you have to do things.
You have to put things into your body.
Religion requires you to participate in it.
They're saying exactly the same thing here.
Burning Man is saying exactly the same thing.
They say you need to participate in the ritual.
You need to put your whole body into it.
And so what does this mean practically?
Practically speaking, what this means...
Is sex drugs and bizarre spirituality.
But that's what it exists for.
This brings us to the most titillating part of Burning Man, which is something called the Orgy Dome.
The Orgy Dome is not the only place at which to have an orgy at Burning Man, but it is the most famous place.
I had to try to find a PG, family-friendly clip about the Orgy Dome, which took up most of my mourning.
But here is the most PG-rated one I could find to explain and give you a little bit of a tour of what the Orgy Dome looked like.
This was a number of years ago, but what the Orgy Dome looks like at Burning Man.
Hello, Kickstarter.
Our Burning Man theme camp has been heating up the playa with the hot sex fire jam and our famous 24-hour air-conditioned Orgy Dome for 10 years.
That's right.
We have been providing an intimate place for lovers in Black Rock City for a decade.
The dome is open to couples and moresomes looking for a safe place to love.
Let's face it, tents get messy and dirty, far from romantic.
And if you are sharing an RV, somehow a dome full of sexy strangers is easier than trying to be intimate with roommates around.
That's where we come in.
When you and your partner enter the dome, you're greeted by us and we make sure you know simple safety rules and given a sanitary towel.
You remove your dusty shoes before entering the orgy dome space, where you will find soft lighting, mattresses and couches on soft carpet, and lovely drapery along the walls.
That, just that voice, just that voice alone makes you think, like, ah, get out of here, you, get out, go away.
That lady sounds like she's been rode hard and put away wet.
That is a reference, but that is an old farm analogy that is not a dirty analogy.
Get your minds out of the gutter.
I know that you were just watching a clip about an orgy dome, so I forgive you for your gutter thinking.
But there really is this, you hear that voice, you're like, yeah, I've been having a great time at the Orgy Dome.
Oh, yeah, I couldn't be happier.
I'm really flourishing.
People can love here on disgusting mattresses.
It's been estimated, and this estimate comes from four or five years ago, that 5,000 people, over 5,000 people, have gone into the orgy dome.
Can you even imagine how disgusting that place is?
For those of you who can't watch, maybe you shouldn't subscribe.
Maybe this is a great argument for listening to the show on audio.
But for those who couldn't see it, it's just filthy mattresses underneath a tent with a lady who sounds like she's smoked six packs of cigarettes a day for 30 years, telling you how lovely and wholesome and enjoyable it is.
It doesn't seem that enjoyable, does it?
But the aspect here that really makes me not want this assignment, even if I could have gotten it, is that everybody is filthy.
There's no cleanliness to this thing.
When you get there, you're encouraged to kind of just roll around in the dirt.
Because there aren't a lot of showers, if there are any showers at all.
People clean off with a little bit of water or soapy water or something.
And just people lying around doing drugs in sweltering heat in the Nevada desert for days and days and days and then frolicking around a filthy orgy dome where 5,000 people have been before you.
If that is not enough to get you to run to church right now, get down on your knees, beg forgiveness, and never leave, I don't know what is.
But this is the promise of Burning Man.
The promise of Burning Man is that you're entering another world.
In this world, you have to clean yourself and work and, like, read books and, you know, wake up on time and take care of people and have accountability and cook dinner and all these things.
At Burning Man, it's another world.
It's a different world.
You don't have to bathe.
You don't have to do anything.
You can roll around in the dirt.
You can have sex with whomever you like.
I mean, presumably you have to get a chick to like you, but I don't know if everybody's hopped up on ecstasy.
I don't know how hard that is.
Then you listen to electronic music.
Even that aspect, it's not like you're listening to Brahms and Beethoven.
You're listening to music that speaks to what Aristotle and Plato would call the base passions, that is just overwhelming.
It's all bass.
It's all percussion.
It's all speaking to that part of you, which is rhythmic and tribal.
So you're just kind of moving and going with the flow, man.
It's another world.
And this is what's drawing so many people.
Now we can get really into the...
I actually sort of feel bad and I don't really judge these hippies because they're in a culture that encourages this and where they think they don't have any other choice.
There's another world.
People are always looking for another world.
There's a reason why drug use is so high up.
It's not simply escapism from the quotidian.
It's looking for transcendence.
It's people, everyone who has ever taken acid or mushrooms or I guess even edibles or smoked pot or something.
They're looking for an experience that is not of this world.
And the reason for that is all human beings long for another world.
We feel like we're not at home in this world.
This is the traditional Christian ethos.
We are pilgrims in this world.
We are made for another world, which is heaven.
C.S. Lewis writes about this beautifully.
C.S. Lewis basically translating Thomas Aquinas for modernity.
He says, quote, Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists.
A baby feels hunger.
Well, there is such a thing as food.
A duckling wants to swim.
Well, there is such a thing as water.
Men feel sexual desire.
Well, there's such a thing as sex.
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
This is the argument from desire, basically.
All of mankind has a desire for God, a desire for transcendence, and therefore there must be a satisfaction to that longing.
Unless the world is one cruel joke, as cynics think it is, as nihilists think it is, then there is a satisfaction for that longing.
That's what the people are looking for at Burning Man.
That's what people go for.
And you see this in the report.
They do every year, they do the afterburn report over who goes to this thing and who is showing up.
The median age at Burning Man is 30 to 34.
It's millennials, slightly on the older end of millennial, but it's people who have been working day jobs and don't feel fulfilled in that.
They're looking for an escape.
They're looking for some way to regress into childhood, to become childish or childlike, and to transcend the everyday.
These are not...
Total poor degenerate people.
That's what you might think.
You'd think it's like all just homeless people showing up, right, to be irresponsible and to screw around and do a lot of drugs.
But that isn't what it is.
What they actually found is that people are disproportionately educated at Burning Man.
They're people who disproportionately have college degrees or even graduate degrees.
I think the majority of people who attend Burning Man, certainly the majority have a BA, and I think the majority have even a master's.
44% of them, almost half of Burning Man, makes over $100,000 per year.
That's pretty high.
So it's all of these yuppies, these young urban professionals, over-credentialed, probably undereducated, looking for something that is not being satisfied in their daily lives.
The breakdown of their religious views is pretty interesting.
15.9% of people who go to Burning Man say that they're religious.
So the vast majority, over 84% of people at Burning Man say they're not religious.
Okay, this might explain why they go there.
About 24% say they're atheist, 1% say that they're deist, 16% say they're agnostic, and then another 8% say, "I don't know," which is very funny because agnostic means "I don't know." So you can add those two together.
It's like 24%, almost a quarter of people there are agnostic.
And then the big number, the lions share almost half of the people who go to Burning Man.
You know what they are.
You know what I'm going to say.
I don't even need to say it, do I? On the count of three, ready?
One, they are.
One, two, three.
Spiritual, but not religious.
Who got it?
100% of people got it.
Spiritual, but not religious.
And this is something that is really pernicious.
I've talked about this in other episodes.
There was a great book on this, An Immovable Feast, which I recommend you read.
It's on this problem of spiritual but not religious.
Spiritual but not religious defines our generation.
It defines millennials.
It's people who want the nice aspects of religion.
They want that natural human longing for God to be fulfilled.
But they don't want to have to do anything about it.
They don't want to have to do anything that they don't want to do.
You know, you read the Bible, and you see the Jews wandering in the desert, and then Moses goes away for five seconds, and they immediately start worshipping a golden calf.
You say, you idiots, what are you doing?
God just delivered you out of the desert.
You have a longing for God.
He's giving you manna.
He's giving you this.
He's giving you that.
And they say, yeah, but I don't want to do any of the rules.
I don't want to follow the rules.
I want God to come to me on my terms.
I'm spiritual but not religious.
I'm not that interested in God.
I'm very interested in me and I want transcendence.
Spiritual but not religious.
That's the lion's share of them.
So another interesting question they say, do you belong to a religion or a religious denomination?
71% say no, 28.8% say yes.
So all of the people who say any religion, paganism, thisism, thatism, Unitarian, whatever, about a quarter of people say, yes, we belong to some religion.
So clearly there's a misunderstanding here with regard to religion.
We've got to wrap this up, but I really want to get to this point.
I think some of you might still be looking at me and saying, Michael, you're being hyperbolic.
You're misunderstanding Burning Man.
Burning Man, it's just people having fun.
It's just kids, stupid kids, going out and having fun.
First of all, they're not kids.
They're 34 years old.
And second of all, they're probably not stupid.
They're actually disproportionately over-educated or at least over-credentialed.
But this is religion.
It's not...
I think that people are misunderstanding paganism here.
It's not that we're misunderstanding Burning Man or that we're misunderstanding the nature of Burning Man.
It's that people are misunderstanding the nature of paganism.
They always pretend it's something other, like that they would never do.
If you read about paganism in any of the ancient myths or any of the ancient histories or the Bible or whatever...
It's this very different thing.
You say, I can't, what is, oh come on, that's what old people did before they had science.
Before, like us, they had science.
Now we have science, so we can't have paganism.
Of course you can.
In many ways, scientific naturalism has created a new paganism.
It's the same idol worship of nature that the Hittites engaged in.
It's the same idol worship of nature that pre-Christian, non-Jewish people engaged in.
And the main religious rite here is the main religious rite.
of those ancient people.
The weirdo, dirty hippies at Burning Man are engaging in the same central religious right, which is sacred prostitution.
Even that phrase, people are unfamiliar with that.
Sacred prostitution is a major religious form.
You see it in Gilgamesh?
Actually, in Gilgamesh, the name is Shamhat.
The sacred prostitute Shamhat is largely responsible for creating civilized man.
For civilizing this wild man and making him a member of society.
It's this sacred prostitute.
Judah has sex with a sacred prostitute in Genesis.
The sacred prostitute Tamar.
Herodotus describes the ancient Babylonians as requiring their women to undergo a sacred prostitute ritual where they go to temples of the love goddess and have sex with men willingly for money or not with money.
The Code of Hammurabi, the oldest legal code in the world, protects sacred prostitutes.
Specifically, the ancient Hittites, the ancient Sumerians, the Corinthians, everybody had sacred prostitutes as a central aspect of their society.
And actually the Phoenician cities, multiple Phoenician cities, had these sacred prostitutes within the Roman Empire until Emperor Constantine put a stop to it.
Does anyone remember where Constantine comes into play?
Constantine is the emperor who broadens the appeal of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, decriminalizes Christianity throughout the empire.
It's only at that point, it's only at the advent of Christianity on a wide scale, that these ideas of sacred prostitution, these ancient rites, go away.
So what do we think?
Is it just that all of these ancient peoples were weird and bizarre and crazy, and these hippies in the desert are just weird and bizarre and crazy?
No, of course not.
I'm not saying that at all.
What I'm saying is there is something essential in human nature that tends toward these things, that tends toward paganism, that tends toward nature worship, that tends toward sacred prostitution, and the idolatry of sensuality, and the idolatry of sensuality.
And there's something different in religion that comes into place, in Christian religion, in Judaism, which says no to that.
It says, do not follow your basest instincts, your base passions, and your human nature.
Do something higher.
Use your mind.
Use your intellect.
Use your consciousness.
Use your will.
To aim towards something higher, which is the true God.
Not these nature spirits that you're worshipping, but the true God.
This is the story of the Bible.
It's the story of the Old Testament.
And the people constantly revert back to their old ways, their natural ways.
That's what's happening at Burning Man.
The people at Burning Man think that they're forming a new society, a new city out of nothing, creating a new thing out of nothing, with this novel idea of a barter system, as though the barter system didn't predate the modern financial system.
This new spirituality, this new sensuality, there's nothing new about it.
It is simply the bass instincts, even the new music.
We think this is a new music, like Bach is old and dubstep is new.
That is exactly flipped.
There is nothing in the world that is older than dubstep or EDM or modern electronic music.
Percussion music.
That's the oldest form of music in the entire world.
The newest form of music is the music that goes higher than that.
That has harmony.
That has melody.
That has sophistication.
It might be 300 years old.
It's still the newest music in the entire world.
And what is happening as a result of this?
Then I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
This is having practical effects throughout our culture.
It's not confined to a random desert in Nevada.
It's going out around the world.
This year Americans are diagnosed with a record number of sexually transmitted diseases.
I don't want to sound like a prude on all of this, okay?
I'm actually not a prude.
There's a time and a place for everything and that place is college or Burning Man, I guess.
But this is really becoming a social problem.
You have to call it out for what it is.
We have a record number of STDs diagnosed in the U.S. 2.3 million people will be diagnosed with an STD this year.
That's the fourth year in a row that we've broken a record.
This trend is getting absurdly high.
We're talking about chlamydia.
We're talking about gonorrhea.
We're talking about syphilis.
Specifically in the gay community, gay guys are spreading syphilis.
Didn't we get rid of syphilis 100 years ago?
Shouldn't this have been gone a long time ago?
No, it's making a comeback.
Paganism, our base instincts, are making a comeback, baby, along with syphilis because people are having unprotected sex.
They're having unprotected sex with multiple partners.
They're having unprotected sex with multiple partners at the same time, in the orgy dome, in the middle of the desert in Nevada.
The CDC is very concerned about this.
The CDC is issuing warnings.
They don't understand why this is happening.
We're modern.
We have science.
We are using our reason, aren't we?
Not at all.
There is a great quote from Chesterton.
He said, the madman is not the guy who loses his reason.
He's the guy who loses everything except for his reason.
People in that desert are using their reason, but they're not using anything else.
They're not grounding it in first principles.
They're not grounding it in traditions and faith and culture.
They're going with their base passions and where their illogic leads them in that.
And this has led to some absurdity in the Me Too movement.
You've now got a porn actress, Jenny Bly, hardcore porn actress, who is complaining because she was treated like a piece of meat on a porn set.
We'll get into that in a second.
We'll get into the transgender social contagion, how all of this social stuff plays a role in our transgender obsession.
It's playing a role in screwing up our kids.
We can blame Charles and Diana for that.
And we've got to talk about politics.
We've got to talk about last night's big primary night.
I can't get to any of that before I say goodbye to you on Facebook and YouTube.
I've probably already said goodbye to you.
We're probably already censored.
There was another wave of censorship that came out this morning.
So, if you're on DailyWire.com, thank you.
You help keep the lights on and covfefe in my cup.
If you are not over there, go to Daily Wire.
You get me, the Andrew Klavan Show, the Ben Shapiro Show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
That's coming up tomorrow.
Get your questions in.
And you also get to ask questions in the conversation, which is coming up with the Big Boss Ben.
None of that matters.
Get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
This is the only way, especially if you're going to that orgy dome in the middle of Nevada.
You're going to have to leave the Leftist Tears in.
Put just a dash of soap.
The salt will help scrub and clean you off before you go into the orgy dome, and it'll bubble up and fizz.
It'll be very good for you.
So Leftist Tears, they have so many uses, don't they?
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
This is an amazing headline.
I feel bad for the woman.
Her name is Jenny Bly or Blig or something.
And she's got a Me Too complaint when she was on a porn set, which is that she said she was treated like a piece of meat.
Now...
Is there even a joke to be made about that?
That is the definition of a porn set, is you're treating your body as a piece of meat.
But I do feel kind of bad for her.
She says, by the way, that the director of the porn movie, who she says groped her, came up and grabbed her while he was filming, copped a little feel, you know, this guy has the name John Stalliano, and she said that he didn't know.
He didn't know that he wasn't supposed to do that, but he should have asked my permission.
But she's an actress in a porno movie, and last time I checked, those movies, that's not like asking permission every step of the way.
I don't think that's how that works.
This is a real social contagion, because in this case, porn is a fantasy, right?
Porn is creating a fantasy and marketing it to people who are desiring a fantasy.
They're desiring a longing for sexuality, and that outlet is a cheap and easy way out, but it's probably not the most gratifying one.
This is a fantasy, and other sexual fantasies are spreading as well.
There was a study at a Brown University Transgender identification is a social contagion.
This spreads around socially.
The study identified groups of young adults who said that the majority of them had trans-identifying people within their small group of friends.
Over 50%.
And this is statistically impossible.
This is 70 times the expected average here of people who have the legitimate social confusion or psychological confusion about their biological sex.
This is much, much higher than average.
So clearly this is spreading in a social way.
It's spreading because it's being mainstreamed by the culture.
The study also found that 62% of people identifying with gender dysphoria had some psychological disorder before they identified as a member of the other sex.
So before they got confused about their sex, they had some other mental illness going on, and almost 50%, 48% of these people had a traumatic event before they had gender confusion.
That's bullying, that's sexual assault, and that's also divorce.
So divorce is listed in there.
Very politically incorrect.
You're not allowed to say it.
Brown was forced to pull this study.
Brown, you know, it's amazing.
They said in their note about this, they sent out a big note to everybody.
They said, we believe in academic freedom.
But...
They always do that.
They always come up, but...
And then they say, we believe in academic freedom, but we don't really.
Ha ha ha.
And then they pulled the study because it's politically incorrect.
But this is the part we can't talk about.
This is...
I was mentioning this at the end of the show yesterday.
The politically incorrect thing here is that we're not allowed to say that perhaps our social...
Physical ailments are gender confusion, the high increase in suicide, the high increase in drug addictions, in alcohol abuse, in opioid abuse, in self-harm, in all of these things.
Maybe that has something to do with our sick culture.
Because that's what this Brown study is saying.
It's saying people who experience abuse, who experience traumas, who experience the divorce of their parents, are more likely to have these mental problems, including gender confusion.
This brings us down to this day in history, which was actually yesterday in history.
In 1996, Prince Charles and Princess Diana got a divorce.
They divorced publicly, and this was in the news.
I remember this as a kid.
It was in the news constantly.
People were so neurotic about the Princess Diana and whatever.
And the effect of that was so mainstreaming of divorce.
Now, look, the Church of England was founded because Henry VIII, you know, wanted to get a divorce and chop off the heads of his wives and have a male son or whatever.
So we can say that Charles and Diana were better spouses to one another than Henry VIII, perhaps.
But you've got to remember, Edward VIII abdicated in the early 20th century.
He had to abdicate the throne because he wanted to marry a divorced woman.
There was a real sense of seriousness about marriage in the early 20th century that fell apart at the end of the 1990s.
All of this is connected.
All of this is connected because Charles and Diana were just symbols on TV, in the aristocracy, in the royal palace, of what was happening around the world, which is that divorce was exploding, especially in the 90s.
Many, if not most, of my friends have parents who are divorced.
Divorce was everywhere.
And some people made it out just fine or relatively fine from divorce.
A lot of people I know were run over by it.
It's an aspect of a sexually irresponsible culture.
And again, I'm not talking about the time and a place for everything.
I'm not saying that when you're a kid you can't experiment or whatever, be a little loose.
But when you're the Prince of Wales, when you're British royalty, when you're on the throne, when you have children...
Don't do it.
You have to put other people before yourselves.
And that sexual selfishness really does seem to go hand in hand with all of these social problems, with all of these psychological problems, and all of these health problems.
They're all connected to this.
Speaking of bad parenting, I've got to go in a few minutes, so I do want to get through these political things.
We can talk more about weird sex at another time.
Speaking of bad parenting, there was a student who assaulted another student in class because he was wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
You have to listen to how the parent reacted to this.
Take it away.
Go right now, please.
Video shows some of the tension inside this high school classroom.
The teacher trying to subdue a fired-up 17-year-old senior.
I don't agree with, you know, grabbing someone's hat and verbally talking to them that way.
But as far as the issue being brought up, that maybe this is something that needs to be brought up.
That's another one of these buttheads.
Drew calls them the buttheads.
They say one thing and then they negate what they just said because they use the word but afterwards.
Says, well, you know, I didn't like that.
But don't wear the hat or you're going to get in trouble.
We're going to hit you.
Really awful parenting.
And this is why Trump is popular.
So in our last minutes here, I do want to cover the primaries last night because they do show very good signs for November for Republicans.
I say that cautiously.
Anything could happen, but these are pretty good signs.
So in Arizona, Martha McSally beat out Kelly Ward and Joe Arpaio.
I like all of those people.
They all seem very nice.
McSally is a good candidate, though, probably a safe candidate when we get into the general election.
And then the real story for Donald Trump is in Florida, where Ron DeSantis won his primary.
He was running against Adam Putnam.
Adam Putnam was the favorite.
He was killing it in the polls.
He was totally going to beat DeSantis.
Then Trump comes out and endorses Ron DeSantis.
Ron DeSantis wins in a landslide.
Even Putnam said that.
He said, we can't catch up.
It's so hard to catch up.
This shows us that even in a swing state, even in a place that really matters, Florida really, really matters in 2020, President Trump's word is very popular.
We know this.
His approval ratings are very high.
He's a popular guy.
Everything is going very well under his presidency.
So the left is furious about this.
I love this.
I gobbled this up.
I took the lid off my Tumblr and just put it underneath the faucet.
Here is the mainstream media freaking out over Trump's popularity.
Last week was a tidal wave of bad news for this presidency, and this president and his approval ratings stayed the same.
So I wonder, I mean, if that's not going to move the needle, is this John McCain thing going to move the needle?
And forgive me for being skeptical, because I was under the impression, as was most people, that when Donald Trump came out and said he was not a war hero...
He likes the guys that don't get caught.
Back in 2015, that people would care.
And when I went out and I talked to Republican voters, they didn't care at all.
The Republicans don't care, but 43% is both a very high number when you realize that that many people are so deluded as to believe this guy's a good president.
But it's also a pretty low number, you know, and a lot of independents have left Donald Trump.
They voted for him in 2016.
They're not going to vote for him again.
They have much more in common with John McCain.
So you have to draw a distinction between hardcore Republicans who, as Trump said, he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, they'd still support him, and a much really larger group of people who go in different directions depending on the election.
88% of Republicans still support him.
You know, nothing that Jonathan Alter said is true.
That guy said, this isn't very high.
According to his daily presidential tracking poll, he's doing better than Barack Obama, also a popular president during that time in his presidency.
But then he says Trump has lost the independents.
Which votes has he lost?
Tell me which votes Donald Trump has lost.
Because all of the awful predictions about Donald Trump's handling of the government have not come true.
The opposite has come true.
Record high economy.
Record high employment.
Everything is going great.
Peace abroad.
Relative peace abroad.
Which votes has he lost?
Just to use that one.
We use it a lot because after Kanye West came out, people started tracking the vote among black voters who typically go for Democrats.
Donald Trump's support among the black voters has more than doubled in just eight or nine months.
What votes has he lost?
He hasn't lost any votes.
That's wishful thinking.
The lady on MSNBC actually has it right at the top.
She goes, darn it, why is he so popular?
I go on TV every day and say he's bad.
Why is he so popular?
He hasn't.
He's had a terrible two weeks.
He hasn't had a terrible two weeks.
He's had a great two weeks.
The NASDAQ broke a record.
The Dow broke another record.
S&P. I mean, what are you talking?
Nobody cares about what you care about.
Nobody cares about, well, he didn't do and he should have done this and he didn't hold his glass.
Nobody cares.
They care about the economy and peace abroad and jobs and everything.
S-T-F-U. I mean, that is, like, that's going to be the banner.
I hate to be vulgar, but we're in a vulgar era, you know, and the left, especially the left, is being vulgar.
The right is being a little vulgar, too, because it's so shocking.
Nobody cares about the things you're pretending to care about.
The polls back that up.
So what is the response?
What is the response going to be because Trump is still popular despite all the hit jobs?
Take it away.
CNN's Jeffrey Toobin.
Jeffrey, go ahead.
Let's be clear also about what's going on here.
The theme here is, I'm Donald Trump and I'll protect you from the scary black people.
Antifa is widely perceived as an African American organization.
And this is just part of the same story of LeBron James and Don Lemon and Maxine Waters and the NFL players and the UCLA basketball players.
This is about Black versus white.
This is about Donald Trump's appeal to racism, and it just happens all the time, and we never say it, or we don't say it enough for what it is, but that's what's going on.
Is that Jeffrey Toobin's nickname for himself?
Is that what widely perceived is?
Because the only person I've ever heard say that Antifa is a black organization is Jeffrey Toobin on CNN. Nobody says that.
In fact, it's exactly the opposite.
There are all these whiny little white communists.
There are all these shrimpy little cowardly white communists who put on napkins over their face.
One, because they're too cowardly and they don't want to get arrested.
And two, presumably, because they're very ugly people.
They're ashamed of that, too.
They hate themselves.
No, that's ridiculous.
But, you know, nice try, Jeffrey.
It has become ridiculous.
It's so lovely, right?
They say, why is Trump still popular?
We've been doing this crooked investigation and all this insinuation and lying about stories, and now we know CNN was lying about a story because Lanny Davis admits it, and this and that, and he's still popular.
You're a racist.
Hey guys, did that work?
I called Trump a racist.
Do you think that's going to work?
It's not going to work.
It's not going to work at all.
They're doing this to Ron DeSantis now.
Not 12 hours after Ron DeSantis wins his primary in Florida.
He went out.
He was talking about how his opponent is sort of a nice guy.
Andrew Gillum.
He's the Bernie-backed socialist.
But he said, look, don't monkey this up, guys.
Don't vote for socialism.
But his opponent, Andrew Gillum, is black.
So now they're saying, he's a racist!
12 hours after he...
12 hours.
But monkey it up or monkey around.
These are just turns of phrase.
These are very popular idioms.
There is not a shred of evidence that race has anything to do with that.
But I think this is the game that Americans are tired of.
Why is Trump's approval rating so high?
Because of things like that.
Because in the old days, if someone said, monkey it up or monkey around...
Nobody would think that that was racist.
Nobody would actually think that.
But the left would pretend it was racist, and the right would pretend that it sounded racist, and then we'd all sort of, oh, he shouldn't have said that.
Oh, no, he really, like, why shouldn't he have said that?
Not a soul thinks it's racist.
We're all just, it's all pretend.
And Trump comes along and smashes all that pretense.
And so now they say, he's racist!
And we're just laughing at them.
We say, okay, yeah, okay, that's cute.
Keep going on that one.
Keep going on that one.
So now your major pitch to voters, this is your big pitch going into November, is racist!
Racist!
The final Democrat pitch going into the midterm elections, Don Lemon, give it to me, baby.
It says it right in the name, Antifa, anti-fascism, which is what they were there fighting.
Listen, there's, you know, no organization is perfect.
There was some violence.
No one condones the violence, but there were different reasons for Antifa and for these neo-Nazis to be there.
One, racist fascists.
The other group fighting racist fascists.
There is a fascist.
There's a distinction there.
So just because something says something, just because the name purports to be one thing, doesn't mean that it is that, right?
You don't get to just name yourself.
McDonald's could name itself like the, I don't know, Health Foods of America.
It doesn't make it health food.
It makes it McDonald's.
It remains McDonald's.
They call themselves Antifa.
They literally wear black shirts.
Like the original fascists, Mussolini's fascists, called the black shirts.
They go out, they wear black shirts, they beat up their political opponents in the street, and they stop them from speaking.
They are fascists.
Democrats have been smart on this so far.
They haven't defended Antifa because Antifa are terrorists.
Now, you've got Don Lemon.
Empty-headed Don Lemon goes out there and starts defending Antifa.
So the argument going in, we've seen these polls last night.
We've seen the primaries.
We can see very clearly that in important swing states, President Trump's still very popular.
This is not surprising.
We also see that the Democrat argument is racist.
And the final pitch...
Defending Antifa.
Vote for Democrats or we'll club you on the head in the street.
That's going to be their pitch.
Unbelievable.
Keep it up, guys.
I hope you do it.
Keep it up, Don Lemon.
I want Don Lemon to run for something.
Get your mailbag questions in because we've got the mailbag tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knoll 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.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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