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Sept. 20, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
51:23
Ep. 220 - Much Ado About Nothing

Allegations against Brett Kavanaugh fall apart, the economy soars, and Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono needs a fainting couch. Then, Ken Starr joins to discuss the special counsel, his old employee Brett Kavanaugh, and just how wicked the Clintons really are. Finally, the Mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The 36-year-old groping allegations against Brett Kavanaugh fall apart, the economy soars to new heights, and Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono needs a fainting couch.
Then, the one and only Ken Starr joins the program to discuss the special counsel, his old employee, Brett Kavanaugh, and just how wicked the Clintons really are, even worse than you think.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
All right, we've got to have the Daily Kavanaugh allegation update.
I guess that's all we do now.
That's all any show can do is talk about not credible allegations from 40 years ago about what a teenage Brett Kavanaugh did.
So this has all fallen apart, as I predicted, by the way.
I would like a little credit here.
Let the record show.
I never took these allegations seriously, and they're even less serious today than they were yesterday or the day before.
So we've had a couple people come out and say, I went to high school with them, and I know that these are real.
And then the second anyone asks them a question, they say, oh, never mind.
I take it back.
I take it back.
So that's not going to work.
The woman, Christine Blase Ford, said that she was going to testify before Congress, and then she didn't do that.
And then now they say they want an FBI investigation.
Why?
I don't know.
I couldn't tell you what the FBI is going to do.
The FBI is just going to go to the Oracle at Delphi, and they're going to say...
Oh, Oracle, tell us, what happened at a party that may or may not have even occurred 36 years ago?
They're going to rub the crystal ball and say, oh, thank goodness the federal government possesses this crystal ball to let us know what happened.
So that's obviously frivolous and absurd.
The Democrats first said that we need to hear this woman.
We need to hear this woman.
The Republicans don't want us to hear this woman, and we are going to hear her or else.
And then the woman said, I'm not going to testify.
Okay.
She said, how dare those Republicans try to bring this woman to a hearing?
How dare they?
How insensitive?
She should never speak before a hearing.
So it's all, all frivolous.
But I would like to give out.
For the first time ever on this show.
You know, we're almost near awards season now.
We had the Emmys over the weekend.
In a month or two, we'll get into the film awards.
I want to give out the Not a Very Serious Person Award, the first annual Not a Very Serious Person Award, for her performance in the fake Brett Kavanaugh allegations.
That would go to Hawaii Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono.
Mazie, come accept your award.
Guess who's perpetuating all of these kinds of actions?
It's the men in this country, and I just want to say to the men in this country, just shut up and step up.
Do the right thing for a change.
Okay, you can see I'm a little upset by this, you know.
Maisie Hirono, setting women back hundreds of years.
Would you like a fainting couch, ma'am?
But the men!
I hate the men and it's all the men's fault!
It's okay.
It's okay.
They're there.
They're there.
It's okay.
Step up and do a change for once, she says, by the way.
So first of all now, all men are assailants or rapists or whatever, according to this frivolous woman.
But then she says men should step up and do something good for once.
For once, as though men have never done anything before.
I should like to point out, I don't really believe in this sort of sexual conflict that Maisie Hirono is bringing up, but just to answer her point, we know that men have stepped up and done great things before.
We know this even in recent history.
The evidence for that is that if American men had not stepped up, And acted courageously and done the right thing.
Then Maisie Hirono and all of the other American women would be speaking German right now.
If they were even allowed to speak.
You know, every great war.
You know, all of the defense of our country.
Running the government.
I think men have done okay.
I think they've done okay over time, but Maisie Hirono...
All of the arguments, by the way, that have ever been made, all of the sexist, chauvinistic arguments, are that women are more prone to be emotional and paint with a broad brush, and that's why they can't be in public life.
And then Maisie Hirono just goes out, I hate all the men!
But then, that actually isn't even the least serious thing she's done all day.
She goes on, and someone asks her, okay...
You're saying that these allegations of Brett Kavanaugh against Brett Kavanaugh are fair, they're real, we should believe them.
What could Brett Kavanaugh do to prove them wrong and to exculpate himself?
Here's what she says.
You have a second question?
What, if anything, could Judge Kavanaugh say in this hearing that would convince you that he didn't do what he's accused of?
He is saying that he didn't do it.
What else can he say?
So I set that aside, and I look at what Dr.
Ford is saying, and we've all said she makes a very credible claim.
So nothing.
He can do nothing.
What could Kavanaugh do to exculpate himself?
Well, nothing.
Nothing.
He can't say anything.
I don't believe anything he said, even though he has an unimpeachable career in the public eye.
He's been a judge for 12 years.
But yeah, okay, I don't believe anything he said.
But then a woman who refuses to testify, to speak to anybody on the record, no witnesses, the only witnesses that she can even muster up say it never happened, calls it absolutely nuts.
That's the woman that we have to believe.
That is not a serious person, Maisie Hirono, but it's also not a credible allegation.
You heard that word.
Did you hear that?
She said that at the incredible.
These are credible allegations.
She's a credible accuser.
And this is a point on language that I think we all need to pay attention to.
You know, they say brevity is the soul of wit.
So I try to always use an economy of words when I write things.
And I bring this up a lot.
I I did a Prager video on the importance of language.
Democrats pervert the culture and pervert our politics by twisting language and we let them get away with it.
They just say slogans that are not true, that distort reality, that pervert reality, and we let them get away with it.
Sometimes we start using that language too.
And that, over time, perverts the culture.
So, I'd like it pointed out.
I wrote a column on this a few days ago.
I talked about it on the show.
I never thought the allegations were credible, even if the woman's not lying or even if she's misremembering or whatever.
I'm just saying the allegation itself is not credible.
Why?
Because there's no evidence for it.
It was made well after the fact, in the heat of a political moment.
No witnesses.
The story has changed.
Nothing about it is credible.
The Democrats, though, have insisted from the beginning.
It's a credible allegation.
It's credible.
It's credible.
When we see this now, they've got their talking points.
Dan Pfeiffer, who's on one of those lefty podcasts, he's an old Obama bro, he tweets out, quote, credibly accused sexual assailant Donald Trump, put incredibly accused sexual assailant Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, tells you everything you need to know about the Republican Party.
Now, what does credible mean here?
What is credibly accused?
Donald Trump paid off a porn star, apparently.
He paid off some other model or something.
I don't think Stormy Daniels has accused him of assault.
I don't think any of the other public people have accused him of assault.
There are a lot of accusations that are surrounding a lot of these people.
But where is the credibility?
And obviously, the Brett Kavanaugh thing is absurd.
From Susan Hennessey at CNN. It is worth pondering that if this doesn't make a difference, and good money says it won't, two of the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will have been credibly accused of serious sexual misconduct.
What a statement to the women of this country.
Now she's referring to Clarence Thomas, who in 1991, same exact thing happened.
He was about to go through, and at the last minute they sprung up some allegation of sexual harassment by a woman named Anita Hill.
Even though Anita Hill had worked with him for a long time, doors were open, they'd never heard any things about this, they couldn't get good witnesses on it.
They totally railroaded him and have really damaged his reputation needlessly.
Brendan Nyhan, who's a New York Times contributor, quote, imagine the reaction to future Supreme Court rulings on women's rights if two of five justices in the majority and the president have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct.
Credibly accused, credibly accused, credibly.
They got their talking points today.
But that tweet sums up what this is really about because likely Kavanaugh is going to get through.
I don't see how he's not going to get through.
And a lot of Insiders are saying within a week, truly, there's going to be nothing left to this allegation.
But what they want to be able to do is, once Kavanaugh is through, be able to run for the rest of his life and say, oh, Kavanaugh, he was accused of sexual assault.
He's a rapist.
He's a rapist!
I mean, there's no evidence for any of that at all, not even in the accusation, but that's what they're going to run on, especially when it gets down to abortion questions.
And Corey Robin, a lefty writer, wrote, quote, If Kavanaugh is confirmed, that means every 5-4 opinion authored by the court's conservative majority will include two men credibly accused of sexual harassment.
If that doesn't call into question the legitimacy of the institution and the rule of law, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
He's underlining all of this.
He's saying, ha ha, we're about to undermine the legitimacy of our institutions, which they've been doing since 2016.
And then Paul Krugman.
Paul Krugman.
Former Enron advisor Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, quote, Once upon a time, catching a Supreme Court nominee in a pretty obvious lie at the same time he's being incredibly accused of other deceptions would probably have been disqualifying.
But this is the modern GOP. Paul Krugman, a member of the party of Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy, FDR, Ted Kennedy, all the Kennedys, Anthony Weiner, Keith Ellison, okay, okay, buddy, sure.
So we need to pay attention to this really closely because when you hear this language, I think a lot of times people hear credibly accused, credibly accused, it's on all the news shows, and they'll just say it, they'll just spout it.
If you're a Democrat, if you're a moderate, if you're a centrist, even some Republicans, oh, it's credible, credible, credible.
No.
No, no.
That was just made up.
They pulled that out of thin air.
A Democrat communications firm, which is likely advising the parties involved here, they said, okay, you've got to use this word, credibly involved.
They do this with videos.
Whenever we have evidence of Democrats being degenerates on video, they say, oh, it was heavily edited video.
Video is edited by definition.
All video is edited.
You start it at a certain place, you end it at another place, you upload it, you put it somewhere.
All video is edited.
They say heavily edited as if to mean untrue.
And they're saying credible accusations as if to say these are true allegations.
And there's no evidence for that at all.
You've got to pay careful attention because while we're talking about this, while we're debating this, this is the worst part of the whole situation, is...
They have us playing on their territory.
So I think we've got to just put an end to it, make this vote happen, get past Kavanaugh, get past this nomination, because the actual headline today is that unemployment, joblessness, has hit a record low.
It is at the lowest level that it's been since 1969.
That's under the economy of President Donald Trump.
What else has happened?
Our stock market has hit a record high.
The Dow jumped 250 points today.
Why is that?
Because investors are not worried about the trade war that the Democrats told us was imminent that was on us right now and sober Republicans said is not a real worry.
The economy has never been better.
It has never been better.
Things are going great in this country.
And they've got us arguing about a 36-year-old allegation where the woman can't say where it happened, why it happened, who was there.
She changes her story.
It only comes out at the 11th hour.
She wants to testify.
She won't testify.
We're talking about that nonsense, that pure fiction that they have crafted.
When we could be talking about the real economy around us, the real political achievements of this administration, and they're trying to play that for the midterms, we should stop it.
Stop all this nonsense.
Give us a vote.
Put him on the Supreme Court and move on because things are going very well.
I'm very, very lucky to have one of the great figures, probably the most famous lawyer who isn't on the Supreme Court in the country, a figure from all of our childhood, Ken Starr, who has employed Brett Kavanaugh and a lot of the players, actually, who are in the news cycles today.
He's been a judge.
He's been all over the place in politics, and he's got a new book out, Contempt, about the Clinton administration and the A special prosecutor investigation, the independent counsel investigation, the Monica Lewinsky affair, and on and on and on.
Ken Starr joins us to discuss his new book and everything else going on in the news, all of which seems to involve him.
Judge Starr, thank you so much for being here.
My great pleasure.
Thank you for having me on.
So, Judge Starr, you have a unique vantage point, I think, in D.C. as you have held just about every important role and every role that we're seeing in the news cycle right now.
D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge, solicitor general, independent counsel, where you employed Brett Kavanaugh, professor, university president, chancellor, now the author of Contempt, which I very, very much enjoyed.
I urge you.
Everybody who is a political junkie to read it, and not just that, anybody who is confused by this news cycle to read it, because it explains a lot of things that even I couldn't quite put together.
And also for millennials, I know a lot of millennials watch the show.
Judge Story, you are a central figure in our childhoods.
You were plastered all over television for all of our childhoods.
So to begin, I want to begin with the job itself.
And then we can use that to go into the news cycle, Kavanaugh, and all of that.
There is a difference between an independent counsel, a special counsel, and a special prosecutor.
You very famously served as independent counsel during the Clinton administration, and you write in the book that when you were offered the job, you didn't think the job should exist.
You disagreed with the law that created the job.
So tell us about that, about the job and how it fits into our constitutional framework.
Yeah, and the constitutional point is very important, but it's also very important at a practical, operational level.
So it has both theoretical importance and practical importance.
Under the independent counsel law, I was appointed to serve as special prosecutor, later named independent counsel, as the law that Congress passed was amended, by three judges.
To conduct an investigation of the President of the United States.
Bob Mueller, our current special counsel in the news, is appointed not by three judges, but he's appointed consistent with the traditions of our country and our law by the Attorney General of the United States, or in this instance, the Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
In that distinction of who appoints And then who ultimately can fire?
And who can guide and supervise lies all the practical and constitutional difference in the world.
I did not like the statute under which I was appointed because I felt and continue to feel that the appointing authority for executive branch functions such as prosecutions of possible federal crimes Should come from within the executive branch, ultimately responsible to the president.
The issue has always been, well, how much independence should this outsider brought in to conduct an investigation of the president or those close around him or her have?
And what the independent counsel law did was to say, we want greater independence Less of a connection to the Justice Department, but we're not going to cut the Justice Department out of the process entirely.
So my final point, I was appointed by three judges, but at the request of the Attorney General under the law, Janet Reno, who is President Clinton's Attorney General.
So under the statute that Congress passed in 1978 as a post-Watergate scandal reform, A special division of judges was set up.
They would do the appointing, but they rolled into operation only at the request of the Attorney General.
So under the statute passed by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal, a law passed in 1978, three judges had the appointing power But they rolled into action only upon the request of the Attorney General, who had information that, oh, something needs to be looked into, an independent counsel should be appointed, but I, the Attorney General, can't do the appointing.
And so the three judges on this special panel asked me to serve.
So let the record show as we stand along.
I didn't volunteer for the job, but I was out.
I asked to serve, and I did serve.
That's how I feel about my job as well.
I didn't volunteer for this, all this abuse here at the Daily Wire.
So on that point, because that really does clear things up.
I think a lot of people see these terms and they don't see the distinction between who appoints whom and where this falls.
I'm not asking you to be too much of a political pundit, but as you observe the Mueller investigation, all of the accusations from both sides, from the president and from Democrats and from the left, How do you think the investigation seems to be going?
Should it wrap up?
Are there calls for it to wrap up?
Should it keep going on past the midterms?
How do you see it so far?
I think Bob Mueller is doing his job, and I have encouraged the president to leave him alone, to stop using...
I know, exactly.
Good luck.
Did you tweet it to him?
That might send a message, but No, I love my country.
I want my president to succeed.
Whether I agree or disagree with the president, I want the president to do a good job.
And one of the messages in the book is that if you see a campaign to demonize the prosecutor, guess where that started?
It started in the Clinton years.
And in fact, the Trump team has been reported as saying, we're just taking a play from the Bill Clinton playbook.
Demonize the prosecutor and do everything you can to stand in the way, deny, delay, and so forth.
Now, that having been said, from what I have read, Bob Mueller, notwithstanding all the rhetoric and all the tweets, has enjoyed the cooperation of the president and the president's team.
There's now a huge issue as to is the president going to be interviewed or not, but the interview of the president If it happens, would come only toward the end of the process.
So now to come back to your basic question, I think Bob Mueller is, if anything, he's winding down in terms of the investigation of collusion.
Now, what we don't know is whether the Attorney General, here the Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, has expanded Bob Mueller's investigation.
We know, of course, that his investigation Immediately took him to Paul Manafort, right?
And so there weren't just questions involving George Papadopoulos, General Flynn, which had to do with the possibility of connections with the Trump campaign with Russian operatives or Russian interests.
Getting the guilty plea recently, this last week, from Paul Manafort is enormously helpful to Paul Manafort.
To Mr.
Mueller, yeah.
To Mr.
Mueller, to Bob Mueller, for obvious reasons.
Not only to save time, energy, resources, and so forth, having to go into trial.
Trials are always uncertain.
You never know what's going to happen.
But here's the key point.
Bob Mueller now enjoys the full cooperation.
At least that's what's called for under the agreement of Paul Manafort.
So that helped get to the bottom of the whole issue of Russian collusion.
Let me say, I've seen no evidence of Russian collusion.
I know about the, we all know about the Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016, but I think that's been pretty much fleshed out, and no charges have been brought, at least thus far against anyone, on the basis of that meeting.
And I want to return to what you mentioned, the Bill Clinton of it all, the Clinton playbook of it all, because reading your book, I really love it.
It's a trip down memory lane for me to my childhood, and I'm seeing all of these characters crop up again.
Rod Rosenstein crops up, a lot of other people who we see in politics, and of course, the Clintons, and Hillary Clinton in particular— You don't paint a great picture of them, including in the title of the book, contempt.
How much of this owes to the Clintons?
How much did the Clinton administration and their handling of your work in particular, but obviously other issues too, how much did that poison our politics and lead to our currently toxic political environment?
I think it contributed to what President Clinton himself called the politics of personal destruction.
Politics is a tough sport, right?
James Stewart, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a book entitled Bloodsport, about the whole whitewater affair before the trials began in Little Rock, in our 14 convictions, guilty pleas, and so forth.
But what the Clintons did was to treat people with contempt.
For example, Monica Lewinsky treated with contempt It wasn't just a denial.
She was a stalker.
She was narcissistic.
I mean, there were different allegations and accusations made against her.
Paul Corbin Jones, who brought a sexual harassment lawsuit that sounds pretty familiar, right?
A sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton for his actions that she alleged occurred in Arkansas during the time he was governor.
Well, what did Clinton's surrogates The most demeaning thing, she's trailer park trash.
Can you imagine that?
And yet, the culture was coarsened.
We think the culture is, some of us have concerns about the directions of the culture.
But I will say this, I was stunned that Bill Clinton personally, and the people around Bill Clinton, could demonize women Who had had either a consensual relationship with the President, or in the case of Juanita Broderick, a very colorable allegation that she had been raped, and I mean raped, by William Jefferson Clinton when he was Attorney General of the State of Arkansas.
And one of the things that I don't say in the book, even though I praise so many people in the press, Yes, I praise so many people in the press as being truth seekers.
And one of those truth seekers...
I'm going to have to ask you about that afterward, but please go on.
Okay.
Yeah, I'm sorry I'm going on.
Shut me up at any time.
No, no, please.
Well, thank you.
Included Lisa Myers of NBC News, who first uncovered the story of the alleged rape, and NBC News would not allow that to air.
Now, think of it now, especially with social media.
Now, remember this is the time when some pretty famous and powerful people, other than Bill Clinton, were doing some very nasty things in the workplace, right?
And all these things are now coming out.
And I think it's a healthy thing.
Now, I'm going to say this, especially in a lot of the Brett Kavanaugh situation.
I believe in Brett Kavanaugh.
I totally respect him.
I've known him for so many years.
He was with me at my side during many years of the investigation.
We practiced law together.
And I think the outpouring of support for him suggests that we are a long, long...
Well, he's just absolutely denied that this alleged episode ever happened with this person or with anyone, anyone, anywhere.
But you're so right.
It's one of the messages of the book.
I think we've grown up in certain respects as a culture.
And that question of the media and of Kavanaugh, because I suppose you're right, I suppose I can agree there are some members of the media who are truth seekers, though it's hard to find them these days.
And I remember, even as a kid, the media destroyed you.
I mean, they targeted you.
You went from being criticized by Republicans as a squish, as being too moderate, to being this right-wing, rock-ribbed, knuckle-drag within two days because the White House turned its attention on you and the media followed suit.
We're seeing this all the way up through Judge Kavanaugh.
Now Judge Kavanaugh has lived this apparently unimpeachable life that we should all be so lucky that the worst our enemies could drag up on us is this story heard for the first time 35 years later.
But what is the media's role in all of this?
Has that media role changed?
Did it change under the Clinton administration?
Or have they always been bulldogs for one political view over the other, for the Democrats, over the Republicans?
Yeah, I have a more benign view of the press.
There are always going to be bad apples, there are going to be partisans who have journalistic credentials.
So they have credentials.
Hey, I'm a journalist.
I'm with Newspaper X or Media Platform Y. But I'm very Jeffersonian about this.
Jefferson hated the Federalist-dominated press and was eager for more anti-Federalist newspapers to get started and so forth.
And yet he wisely knew we've got to have the free press.
We've got to have an aggressive free press.
So all I say is Be careful who you're listening to.
Assess it.
But always ask the question.
Am I hearing the truth?
Am I hearing facts?
Or am I hearing sin?
And every White House has its propaganda operation.
I understand that.
But what Bill Clinton did with his operatives, the James Carvels at the time, the George Stephanopoulos and so forth, those folks were masters at the arts The evil and dark part of fitting a narrative, but in the process, I don't think Stephanopoulos ever did this, but Carville definitely did.
He made a sport of attacking people, and so did Hillary Clinton.
Bill Clinton was much more elegant about it.
Obviously, he's a naturally charming and charismatic guy.
I pay tribute to his many political gifts in the press, but Hillary is cut from a different cloth.
She turned her back on her upbringing in the suburbs of Chicago.
When she went to Wellesley, she became radicalized.
You say, oh, that's a terrible thing to say.
No.
As I described in the book, she became a follower and student of Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules for Radicals.
And what is one of the rules for radicals?
Now, not rules for Christians, rules for thoughtful secularists, Rules for kind atheists.
Rules for radicals.
And once one of the key rules of radicals, attack and destroy.
Attack and destroy and lie, lie, lie.
In the book you talk about how she was so brazen in saying, I don't remember.
Oh, I don't recall.
I don't remember.
That you considered charging her with perjury, if I'm getting that right.
You got that exactly right.
And thank you for noting that because You know, part of the meta-narrative is, oh, Star found nothing in Arkansas and then went after the president because of a private consensual relationship.
So we all know that narrative.
Even if you were a child, you now know.
I mean, that's just part of our modern history, right?
Totally wrong.
And so one of the reasons I wrote the book, my memoir, is to set the record straight, to complete the records, and here is a fact.
Not fiction and not spin.
14 criminal convictions in Arkansas, and then most relevantly in light of your comment, we seriously considered going before the grand jury in Little Rock, Arkansas in the spring of 1998 and say, indict Hillary Rodham Clinton.
But we made the professional judgment that we did not have the evidence, sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she committed these offenses.
So she was a very lucky person.
She should be down on her I hate to use that image.
At night, saying, thank you, dear Lord, that for what I did, that I was not prosecuted by the independent counsel.
Absolutely.
And that image of Hillary Clinton on her knees praying, I don't know.
Does the saying go, the angels take care of their own?
Or I don't know.
Maybe it's a different saying than that.
I don't know who she's praying to exactly.
I think the angels take care of drunks and lawyers.
Yeah, that's right.
Throughout the book, I love that you continually return to what is the truth.
We're after the truth.
Everyone you're speaking to, Monica Lewinsky, whoever it is, we're after the truth.
And it's something that maybe there isn't enough of these days.
So I really encourage people to read the book because I think a lot of us saw it on TV and we were told a certain narrative of what happened.
And those issues are still affecting us today, and it's important to get that record right.
Judge Starr, I've taken up far too much of your time, so I will let you go.
Thank you so much for being here, though.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, well, it's a great pleasure, and thank you for promoting the book.
In many respects, it's a cry from the heart about our country and how good our country is and that our system of law does, in fact, work.
It can be quite ugly at times.
But the ugliness is not our system of law.
The ugliness is the human condition, the human being in our system, but our system is very structurally sound.
May we keep our system of a constitutional republic.
Dr.
Franklin asked us to do that on Constitution Day, September 17, 1787.
May we continue to guard and love our constitutional republic.
Amen.
Ken Starr, one of the most insightful people in our public life.
So we've got a lot more to get to.
We have a whole mailbag today, and I'm going to get through all of them.
Probably I won't, but I'm going to try to get through all of them.
So if you are at dailywire.com, thank you very much.
You help us keep the lights on and covfefe in my cup.
If you are on Facebook and YouTube, get out of there, man.
Get over to Daily Wire.
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You get everything.
You get everything that you could ever want.
Most importantly, the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
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But the man!
and it's the med room.
Very, very good.
Thank you, Senator Hirono.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
Let's jump right in from Arun.
Dear Dr.
Kofefe, I often hear my leftist acquaintances of Caucasian descent say, check your privilege to each other.
What does this mean?
I honestly have never been quite sure what to make of this ridiculous phrase.
Could you please explain it and deconstruct it for me?
Yes, it means shut up.
Check your privilege means shut up.
That's the only way that it is ever used.
That's all that it implies.
That's the only action that is requested by that phrase.
Check your privilege means shut up.
It means you have an opinion that I can't refute or argue against.
So I'm going to, on the basis of your race, or your sex, or if you're a man who thinks he's a man, or a woman who thinks she's a woman, tell you to shut up.
So shut up.
That's what it means.
The reason that it's prevalent among left-wing circles is because everybody's got to serve somebody, and leftist politics is a jealous, angry god, which will have no god before it.
So it replaces religion.
You know, we've talked about this with environmentalism.
Environmentalism, global warming, has all of the trappings of religion.
It has original sin in the form of pollution.
It has indulgences in the form of carbon tax credits.
There are works that you can do.
There are things that you can do to bring yourself closer to the God, Mother Nature, Gaia, whatever you want to call it, Earth Day, whatever.
This is also true in the check your privilege, in the intersectionality, politics of identity, race, sex, whatever, which is that when they walk around and say check your privilege, it's a sort of inversion of mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
When you begin a mass, you call to mind your sins, and you say, I've sinned, I confess my sins to you, my brothers and sisters, please pray for me to the Lord our God.
In this case, you're flipping it.
You're saying, you're a sinner.
You're bad.
You've committed the sin of being white.
You've committed the sin of being a man.
You've committed the sin of being a man who thinks he's a man.
You've committed the sin of being a man who's attracted to women.
And so it's an inversion.
It's angry.
It's not very charitable.
It's not very graceful.
It's not very loving.
But it is a feature of the religion of leftism.
And you should ignore it.
It's stupid.
It's ridiculous.
I'm kind of lucky because I'm just swarthy enough.
I don't know where I fall on the privilege scale.
But you would even see this sometimes.
I think people in colleges, for instance, who come from financial aid.
My family did not have a lot of money, and I was on financial aid.
And I would notice this in college.
Anyone who's a Republican is pilloried as being rich or coming from a lot of money or whatever.
And the impulse is to say, no, I didn't.
I didn't come from a lot of money.
I came from humble backgrounds.
I've had tough things in my life.
I think it's a huge mistake.
I don't think you should do that.
You should never engage with those hateful arguments.
If you get into a fight with a skunk, it doesn't matter if you win.
You're going to end up smelling very, very bad.
Don't give those premises away.
Don't acknowledge the privilege thing.
Just laugh at it.
Laugh at it and move on.
From Zachary.
Dear Michael Corleone Al Pacino lookalike knolls.
Hoo-ah!
Big man!
Excuse me.
I recently had an argument to prove God to a friend of mine, and a question came up that I really couldn't answer, so I'll pose it to you.
If God can see the future and knows how it goes, why create anything in the first place?
It's an interesting question.
This hasn't occurred to me.
And it is worth noting.
You can't prove God.
You can make arguments for God, but God is the basis of all meaningful speech.
So it sort of begs the question, even those arguments.
But there are good arguments for God, and there's a lot of evidence for God.
The question is, why would you create anything at all if you know how it's going to end?
How else could you create anything?
What are you talking about?
Any artist who creates a work of art knows how it ends, by definition, because he creates the art.
So he creates the ending of it.
If you're outside of time and space, if you're outside of creation, then you know about creation.
You know everything about creation.
But what work of art would you create where you didn't know how it ended?
Could you write a novel and not know how it ends?
Could you make a movie and not know how it ends?
Could you paint a picture and not know how it ends, not know everything about it?
Of course not.
The relationship between God and man is similar to the relationship between Shakespeare and Hamlet.
Hamlet is the creation of Shakespeare.
He's outside of the book.
Shakespeare knows how Hamlet ends.
I won't spoil it for you if you haven't read it.
But, of course, I don't see that objection at all.
In fact, that objection seems to me a good argument for God as we know God.
And there's an extra part of the story because then the Creator enters into the creation, enters into the story, and makes the greatest story ever told.
But you've got to read past the first chapters to get to that part.
From Spencer, oh, Knowles, who knows?
How do you think we can maintain a sense of purpose, whether as a society or as individuals, if we reach a point by technological advances that will render work largely superfluous?
Spencer, we won't, because we're creative.
Human beings are creative, and so there's never a point at which we won't want to work.
Adam in the garden, in perfection, was given a job and he worked.
It is in our nature to work.
When people don't work, they atrophy and fall away and die.
They spiritually and sometimes physically.
Now, does that mean that I'm going to, at some point there won't be a robot that can clean my house?
Yeah, there's probably going to be a robot that can clean my house.
That's great because then I can work on other things like not writing books.
Maybe you asked the wrong guy this question.
But even if there is certain work that is automated, that will just create other work because we are creative people.
And this is, when people talk about artificial intelligence, they speak of the human mind as if the human mind is just a computer that only exists to solve problems presented to it.
That is such a misunderstanding of the human mind.
The human mind is creative.
We are made in the image of God, the creator, and we are creative.
We essentially create.
At...
There is no robot that is going to stop me from creating or stop my impulse from creating.
That's, in a very essential way, what makes us human.
From Patrick.
Two knowles it all.
The other day I overheard someone who calls themselves a sexual freethinker asking why consensual incest is wrong.
It was made very clear that he doesn't put any stock toward religion's teaching on this and our moral viewpoints should be challenged on a regular basis by an honest and unbiased viewpoint.
He also mentioned that the argument for preventing the mental and physical dysfunctions brought on by such relations was a eugenic one and would effectively close off certain people from reproducing because it would likely result in the same thing.
This in mind, how would you argue against this line of thought?
Thanks and love the show Patrick.
What is unbiased thinking?
Tell me what unbiased thinking is.
What moral vision does not take into account metaphysics?
Morals aren't a physical thing.
This isn't a moral.
Well, leftist tiers have a lot of moral value, but they're not morals themselves.
Morals aren't a physical thing.
They are metaphysical things.
So when we discuss morality, we discuss metaphysics, which is in the realm of philosophy and theology and religion.
So if he says, I want to discuss metaphysics without discussing metaphysics, then he's a dumb-dumb and should realize the error of his ways.
But to the question itself, why is consensual incest wrong?
This has cropped up in a lot of news stories.
Some teacher just got fired for asking this question to his students.
This has come up in a number of colleges and philosophy and psychology classes.
Why is it wrong?
Well, you can't I suppose you can look at physical evidence, which is that the kids are more likely to have disabilities and dysfunctions in them.
But even ignoring that, why is it wrong in itself?
Let's say that they used perfect sexual protection, you know, pills and prophylactics and this and that and the other thing.
Just the union itself, why is that?
It's because it is an attack on the family.
It attacks familial love.
It is unnatural.
It is against natural law, which does exist.
And when we talk about natural rights, when we talk about human rights, the only way that human rights and natural rights make any sense is if we talk about a natural law to which we can associate them.
So it is wrong.
Now, if your friend says he doesn't want a moral argument for why it's immoral, then I can't help him very much.
But if he's asking for something that is beyond the realm of metaphysics, the only help I could give him is something that Leon Kass, who's a terrific bioethicist, a genius out of UChicago, he wrote an essay about this probably 20 years ago, about the wisdom of repugnance.
And I'm not saying that this should be the entirety of your argument for why incest is wrong, but this might be a good starting point if you don't want to rise to the higher levels of philosophy or theology or whatever, which is that.
There are certain things that we just...
We feel it is wrong to watch a boy murder his grandmother or sleep with his sister.
We see assaults on the family as wrong.
Why is that?
It's something built into us, certainly.
And there are two ways of approaching this.
It seems your friend...
It is approaching it and saying, well, if I can't rationally explain right now with his apparently limited rational faculties why it's wrong, then it can't be wrong.
And then there's another way of approaching it, which is, hmm, why do I feel this way?
Why does it seem to me and to every great thinker ever that this is wrong?
Perhaps they were on to something.
It's Chesterton's fence.
There are two reformers.
If you drive up in the middle of the wilderness and you see a white fence just right in the middle of nowhere, one type of reformer says, I see no reason for that fence to be there.
Pull it down.
But the wiser reformer says, before you pull that fence down, you need to explain to me why that fence is there.
When you explain to me why that fence is there, then you can tell me why we should pull it down.
And this is the case with an issue like this.
And as a broader point on politics, this is something that the left and right differ on because I think, and I'm firmly on the right, I think that I could explain Most of the views, most of the opinions of the left, of my friends on the left, I've got a lot of friends, probably most of my friends would call themselves left-wingers.
And I think that I understand and could explain most of their opinions.
And I think they could not explain most of my opinions.
That should tell you something.
You should be able to understand the other point of view before you refute it.
We've still got some time.
From Arun.
I bet that's the same Arun.
I don't think there are a lot of Aruns watching the show.
Dear Dr.
Covfefe, should we...
Yeah, it's definitely the same one.
Should we grant citizenship or permanent residency to immigrants who express consistently anti-American views in public, like taking a knee or calling America racist?
Both my parents are immigrants from India and on the rare occasions when people in our community disparage America or the flag, it bothers us that they are denigrating the country that gave us everything we have.
Again, this sentiment is rare, but should people with these views be permitted to become citizens?
Or should they just be judged on their economic merits?
Thanks, and may your cup overflow with covfefe.
Yeah, we should not allow those people to become citizens.
If you don't love the country, you should not be allowed to become a citizen.
If you're already a citizen, that's too bad.
I guess, you know, we'll have to deal with that.
But absolutely not.
There are a couple points of view on this.
The one is this total open borders, just...
Make an idol out of free trade and what would be called globalism or imperialism, which says, yeah, if you can add to our GDP by.0002%, who cares if you're a Nazi?
Come on into the country.
Who cares if you hate our country?
Who cares if you want to undercut our country?
And there's another view that says, no, in order to join the country, you have to love the country.
You have to love what it's about.
You need to support it.
You need to know something about it.
You need to be brought into it.
That is the view.
People who don't love America should not be permitted to become Americans.
It's as simple as that.
And if they're here already and they're not citizens, boot them out.
Get them on the next boat.
Send them home.
Hello to the Daily Wire representative from the Vatican.
My question concerns how to deal with selfishness in a relationship.
I've been single my whole life, so I don't have a horse in this race.
Sorry to hear that.
But my friends and their partners all seem to be focused on what they can get out of the relationship and not about the other person.
I was wondering what is the best way to quell these selfish tendencies.
Also, I could use some advice on how to get into the dating game as I've not yet participated in it for all 18 years of my life.
Thanks.
Love the superior Daily Wire podcast.
You have good taste, sir.
I find this is...
To use conservative philosophy in public policy and economics, it's very easy.
It's much easier to channel one's bad tendencies into a good tendency than to just try to stomp them out altogether.
So my argument for why you shouldn't be selfish in a romantic relationship or a marriage is that it will hurt you.
That you're ultimately being self-sacrificial or ultimately being self-destructive if you do that.
Selfishness in a relationship will poison the relationship.
It will poison your life.
You will be miserable.
You will look back on your relationship and think, gosh, what a waste of opportunity.
What a selfish little ruffian I was.
What word am I looking for?
little bug that I was.
If you really are looking out for your own interests, then in a relationship, in a marriage, you should be selfless.
And then you'll have a better time and your life will be better and you will grow in love and you will have a smile on your pillow every night and you will wake up feeling joyful.
If you want to look out for your own self-interests in a relationship, don't be selfish.
From Matthew.
Good day, Mr.
Kofefe.
Was public speaking ever difficult for you?
Assuming someone is not naturally charismatic, how much of getting better at public speaking is just practicing it over and over, and how much is it conquering your fear of failure or worry of what people think of you?
What is the relationship between this experience and this fear?
Thanks, big fan.
So, I don't remember...
I've heard that I spoke at a very young age.
I think I started speaking at 11 months or something.
So there might be a natural component to speaking publicly or being comfortable speaking.
And so perhaps some people are less naturally fit for that than others.
But I think...
Much more important than that is practice and training over time.
You know, I recommend acting classes to everybody.
I think it's very helpful.
It helps you understand characters.
It helps you study human nature.
It helps you participate in an artistic field.
It gets you better at speaking.
It gets you better at knowing just the muscles of speaking.
Sometimes people on Twitter will make fun of me for enunciating too much or having precise diction.
I've taken a lot of diction classes.
That's just the way I talk, you know.
And it's good because then people can understand you more easily.
So I think you can overcome that very easily.
Some of our great orators had speech problems.
Winston Churchill had a speech problem.
I don't think Abraham Lincoln was, you know, from the age of two just spouting off and listening to the sound of his own voice.
I don't think he was doing vaudeville shows or anything like that.
It can come with practice and with practice then you...
Then you gain in confidence.
But it is a muscle.
It's a muscle like anything else.
A little pro tip here, if you're ever doing a university play or something like that, I think a lot of people, when they're trying to memorize lines, they just read them in their head.
So they'll have the script up and they just read them in their head.
And you won't memorize lines very effectively that way.
The way that you most effectively memorize lines is to say them in a very exaggerated way.
So, you know, for a question, you could say, Dear Michael, President Covfefe...
And you do that because there is a certain muscle memory, and it will trigger other things.
Especially in our culture, a lot of people just want to have a rationalist...
A view of everything.
To have everything abstracted and in the ethereal realm.
But you've got to put it into your body.
And when you put it into your body, it'll become a lot easier for you.
As for...
Alright, I'll get to that.
I'll get to the next part of that if it pops up in another question.
From Kyle.
Michael, I'm in college and there are few girls in my classes that I'm interested in dating.
Switch colleges, dude.
One of the reasons why I haven't asked one of them out is because I do not have a car.
I could call an Uber to pick her up.
I don't do this because I feel like it is my traditional responsibility to provide the transportation.
The real answer here is me manning up and asking one of them out, but then it comes to what is the most proper way for us to get around town.
Thank you, and I can't wait for your next Valentine's Day conversation.
Kyle.
Don't worry about it.
You're in college.
Don't worry about a car.
I never had a car in college.
I didn't have a car when I lived in the city.
I wouldn't worry about that.
It depends if you're going to go to a bar or a restaurant or something that's near where you and she live, then you can walk.
I think that's perfectly fine.
Or take an Uber.
Taking Ubers are great because then you can drink a lot and not worry about killing somebody.
That's a win-win.
This, though, does get to a point that I've talked about before when people ask me for dating advice.
You're not going to ask a girl out, even if you like a girl, even if you think she's cute and you think she's smart and funny or whatever, because you're worried that you won't impress her by not having a car.
You're just thinking about you.
Forget about that.
Who cares?
What is it about?
Is it about you showing off to a girl?
Or is it about you getting the girl?
Get the girl, dude!
Get the girl!
Hope that helps.
I'll do one more.
One more.
I'm sorry.
I'm doing it.
Too bad.
From Mark.
Michael, your article, Here's All of the Evidence Against Brett Kavanaugh, is well written and informative.
It shares the same level of precision as some of your other books.
The Product of a Master.
Well done.
Thank you.
You're clearly a scholar.
I'm glad.
That's a good question to end on because it's not a question.
It's just a statement.
And you clearly have a robust wealth of historical and political knowledge to draw on.
If you could understand my article, here's all of the evidence against Brett Kavanaugh.
I've got a great book that I can send you.
Okay, that's our show.
We're going to have a show tomorrow because we didn't have one on Tuesday.
So I will see you then.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
Talk to you soon.
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.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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