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Oct. 18, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:23
Ep. 236 - Make ‘Em Angry, Make ‘Em Stupid

Democrats continue their downward spiral as pollsters up Republicans chances for the midterms, all of which exposes a fundamental rule of politics: when your opponent gets angry, your opponent gets stupid. Then, CNN and Twitter expose themselves as hypocrites, President Trump offers voters an honest choice, and Teen Vogue gives us the Dumbest Article on the Internet Today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Democrats continue their downward spiral as pollsters up Republican chances for the midterms, all of which exposes a fundamental rule of politics.
When your opponent gets angry, your opponent gets stupid.
Then, CNN and Twitter expose themselves as hypocrites, President Trump offers voters an honest choice, and Teen Vogue gives us the dumbest article on the internet today.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Things are going from bad to worse for Senate Democrats, some other candidates as well, looking really bad.
Nate Silver, he's the pollster who made his career just predicting that Obama would win things.
Nate Silver, a left-leaning pollster, is saying that right now there is a better chance that the GOP picks up votes in the Senate than that the Democrats take the Senate.
People are losing their minds in these Heidi Heitkamp, Beto O'Rourke, You know, the Mexican Beto O'Rourke, milady.
Oh, Beto boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.
We'll cover all of those races first.
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So Nate Silver is putting GOP chances at picking up seats in the Senate.
Picking up seats at a higher chance than Democrats taking the Senate.
Right now the Senate is very close and who knows?
Anything could happen.
In the midterms, the party that holds the White House is supposed to lose seats, maybe lose the Congress, lose the Senate.
Things are looking pretty good.
To drive this point home, things are looking so good right now for Republicans compared to what they should be looking like That there's this candidate in Nevada, GOP candidate for state legislature, who is a pimp.
He owns a bunch of brothels.
He died a few days ago.
A dead pimp discovered at his brothel by Ron Jeremy, the 70s porn star, after a party that was attended by Joe Arpaio, the sheriff, Grover Norquist, the tax guy, and Tucker Carlson called in.
Dead?
The guy is actually dead.
Dead pimp in Nevada.
He is poised to win his race.
It is right now all of the polling suggests a dead pimp in Nevada is going to win the race because he's a Republican over the Democrat.
This is unbelievable stuff.
Now look, anything could happen here.
I don't...
I want you to be confused with my making a prediction.
Predictions can become self-fulfilling here.
If the Republicans don't feel motivated, they won't get out the vote, and they're going to lose everything.
They're going to lose everything, and then they're going to impeach Trump, and then they're going to try to convict Trump in the Senate.
Nate Silver, the left-wing pollster, still puts Democrats at an 84% chance of taking the House.
That's what the data say right now.
Data have been wrong before.
I've got 400 smackers and a check signed by Ben Shapiro over there because the data were wrong in 2016.
Anything could happen right now.
Enthusiasm is really high on the Republican side.
This is something of what is unprecedented.
In part, it's because of Kavanaugh.
In part, it's because of Liawatha, Liz Warren.
In part, it's because of these unfair, the Russia investigation that's, I think, now in its 75th year.
All of these things seem very unfair.
The news media stacked against them and that everything is going so well in the country, which we'll cover a little bit later.
But the economy is going well on the other side.
Unemployment basically doesn't exist.
Things are going gangbusters.
Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chairman, says that this is the tightest labor market he's ever seen in his life.
And Alan Greenspan is like 7,000 years old.
So things are going really well.
That's why Republican enthusiasm is up.
Democrat enthusiasm is really high, too.
So let's say Republicans have enthusiasm at 2010 levels.
Democrat enthusiasm is really high, which means it's anybody's game.
It's all about getting Republicans out there and depressing the Democrat vote, which the mainstream media and Democrats themselves have done pretty well.
I think there's a chance that maybe only one out of 1,024 Democrats will actually show up.
We'll only get one 1,024th of the Democrat expected vote.
But they've really gone mad.
So this gets to my central thesis here, which is that when your opponent gets angry, your opponent behaves stupidly.
Get angry, go mad, get stupid.
And Donald Trump has made them angry, he's driven them mad, and therefore they've gotten a little bit stupid.
To just give you a little taste of this, I will show you a glimpse of every Democrat voter in the country.
I hate that cruise!
Thank you.
That about sums it up.
That's pretty much every voter ripping up the sign, you know, getting all crazy.
This was a guy who was just walking down the street trying to tear up Ted Cruz signs.
Obviously, the Democrats have been driven mad.
They have a madness.
They have gone crazy.
That guy looks like a demon.
He's being like, what have you to do with us, Ted Cruz?
Our hour has not yet come.
Bye, bye.
Whatever, you know, your hours not yet come.
We mentioned this last week.
Vox.com, the left-wing outlet, has been encouraging Democrats to practice witchcraft.
It's not a joke.
You know, Pat Robertson said this in 92.
He said that feminism makes people practice witchcraft.
Now Vox.com is proving him right.
They're saying, yeah, Democrats should practice witchcraft in solidarity with one another.
There was a story out today that a woman has become an abortion doula in New York.
You know, a doula to help a woman through pregnancy.
She's become the opposite of that.
She's become an abortion doula, and she's asked and begged to be in the room for 2,000 abortions.
And the woman looks like a witch.
She's got crazy colored hair.
She looks all kooky.
She looks like, I mean, if you just look up witch in the dictionary, you'll get this woman.
Also, speaking of witches and demons, these Antifa, the quote-unquote anti-fascists in Brooklyn from Catland Books, are now calling themselves witches, and they're saying that they're going to put a hex on Brett Kavanaugh.
They're going to use a bunch of spells and magic and things like that to put a hex on our new Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh.
And when they were asked about this, why is Antifa, this left-wing political group, why are they associating with witchcraft?
They said this, quote...
We're embracing witchcraft's true roots as the magic of the poor, the downtrodden and disenfranchised, and its history as often the only weapon, the only means of exacting justice available to those of us who have been wronged by men.
Now, luckily, we've got priests and exorcists praying for Brett Kavanaugh, so hopefully the hex won't work and the Antifa lunatic witches will be stymied.
But this reminds me of a central book on the left, Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.
Saul Alinsky, tactics used by Barack Obama, a friend of Hillary Clinton's.
Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky.
They had a lot of...
Correspondence back and forth.
She called him a mentor and a friend of hers.
And Saul Alinsky dedicated his most famous book, Rules for Radicals, to Lucifer.
To that first rebel who won himself a kingdom.
Lucifer.
After the first edition, I think they took that dedication out.
But it's in the first edition, and it really does make me wonder.
Look at the imagery on both sides.
You've got, broadly across the left, people adopting Witchcraft imagery, cultish imagery, satanic imagery, evil, wicked, dark imagery.
And then, you know, obviously on the right, there's the religious right that adopts light imagery, godly imagery.
I don't think that's an accident.
I really don't think that's an accident.
And just listen to how those witches in Brooklyn and how Saul Alinsky, you know, the community organizer, Thug, who was an ideological hustler, especially exploiting poor people, They put these witchcraft images into ideological leftist terms.
They say witchcraft is about the poor over the rich or about the oppressed over the oppressors or this or that.
They're using all of that divisive language of the left to make it about us versus them.
We're going to start a new world.
We're going to conquer them.
It's all about division.
It's all about greed.
And ultimately, it's all about failure.
I really don't think it's a coincidence.
And this is a step along the road.
You make your opponents angry.
You make them mad.
You make them lose their minds.
You make them look like that guy with the cruise signs.
I hate to cruise!
Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah!
I'm sorry, by the way, that almost lapsed into a sweet little Elisa voice.
I didn't mean to do that.
That was a demon voice that I was intending.
This is the rule.
You make your opponents angry, you make them mad, and you get them to act stupidly.
This is the great advantage we have going into these midterms.
Heidi Heitkamp, we talked about this yesterday.
Running in North Dakota.
She is Democrat.
She's down by a lot.
She was already down by about 12 points.
And she released a newspaper ad listing purported victims of sexual assault.
The only problem was they never consented to have their names in the newspaper ad.
Some of them don't support Heidi Heitkamp.
Some of them say they weren't even sexually assaulted.
I mean, this is a total catastrophe for For Heitkamp, a total meltdown.
She came out and she apologized, but this is probably going to kill her campaign.
The fallout is still happening.
Here is one of the women who was named in that advertisement, giving her opinion of Heidi Heitkamp's tactic.
We just heard from Senator Heitkamp who said, all I can do is say, I'm sorry.
I want to know what I can do to fix this.
Has she said that personally to you, that she's sorry?
No, she has not.
You were told, though, as I understand it, that she would be reaching out.
Yep.
I was told that she was going to reach out to every one of the women that was, you know, put in this without our consent.
But she has yet to reach out to me.
She said she also wants to know what she can do to fix this.
Is there something in your mind that she could do?
You know, the damage has kind of already been done.
You know, the names that didn't want to be put out there are already out there for the world to see and you can't really retract that.
The damage is done.
The damage is already done.
There are certain things you can't undo.
There are certain things you can't unsay.
You know, in politics, slick politicians are always trying to leave themselves wiggle room.
Always leave yourself an exit strategy, whatever you say, whatever promise you make, whatever tactic you employ.
And usually, good politicians are very careful about all of these things.
But when you start to really get emotional, when you start to get really passionate, when you start to get really angry You start to make mistakes.
And that's what Heidi Heitkamp did here.
She was so whipped up into a frenzy by the Me Too movement, by the Kavanaugh stuff, by Donald Trump talking about women, that she allowed herself to make a colossal mistake.
You can't take that back.
And so it doesn't look like she's got a real future.
This is another point I want to underscore.
We talked about this When Nikki Haley gave that speech about how we shouldn't own the libs, how it's a bad idea to own the libs, and to get people angry, and to trigger them, and to make fun of them, because it doesn't persuade anybody.
Nonsense.
This is why you have to own the libs.
This is why.
Because you whip your opponents into an anger and into a frenzy, and then they make mistakes.
They hang themselves, they tie the rope, and they throw it over the beam.
I mean, they will do the work properly.
It's not that Donald Trump is some master tactician and strategist.
I don't think he is at all.
I think he's extraordinarily effective because he triggers his opponents into doing all the damage themselves.
And that's what's happened with this hype camp thing.
The fallout, even on CNN, even on these left-wing outlets, even on the mainstream news, ABC, NBC, even they have to admit that this was a big error.
Listen to what some of the other victims are saying.
She says she's terrified for her safety like many other victims because of this situation.
There are people that I am in hiding from when I was, you know, from when these actions happened to me when I was a teenager.
And my name being blasted out there, you know, and especially I didn't realize this until this morning that my, not my address, but at least, you know, the town that I live in was also posted on this.
That's right.
It's actually putting these girls in danger.
The reason the voice was all messed up is because she's trying to hide her identity and hide her voice, so they put a little scrambler on her.
But of course, it's tantamount to doxing people.
In the age of social media, in the age where you can look up someone's name and find out basically where they are, this is tantamount to doxing them.
There were people who were trying to dox United States senators in the U.S. Congress, and those people were...
I mean, that is felonious behavior.
But they're doing it because they were whipped into such a frenzy they couldn't see the consequences of their actions.
This was such an obvious blunder to someone who is thinking clearly.
But you've always got to think clearly.
I think this is also true for the people on the right.
Some people on the right were really triggered by President Trump, both as president and as a candidate.
And they started thinking emotionally a little bit too.
And some of them have egg on their face now.
You don't want to do that.
You should always view politics clearly.
Politics lives on outrage.
It thrives on outrage.
We'll explain why.
Donald Trump knows this, and he's using it to all of our advantage in a little bit.
But you, at least, have to try to think clearly.
I have this rule on Twitter.
If I ever start to get angry, which almost never happens, if I ever start to feel that way, I log off Twitter.
Because then you make mistakes.
You don't want to leave yourself open to making those kind of mistakes.
By the way, the mainstream media mob, word carefully selected, the mainstream media mob are letting themselves make mistakes too because they are really starting to lose it as well.
Here is just a clip from, I think her name is Brooke...
Brooke Baldwin.
So you know this whole mob issue.
She said, this girl on her show, Brooke Baldwin, said, I'm not going to let people use that talking point.
I'm not going to let them use the word mob.
And she cut off this guy because he said Democrats are behaving like a mob.
You know, there's mob violence.
Democrats are calling for more mob violence at politicians' homes.
She said, I'm not going to let you use that talking point.
Here's her defending her line.
So, we had Matt Lewis on, who I love having on from the Daily Beast, and he brought up the word mob.
And at the time, the mob word had been this talking point from Republicans from all up and down Capitol Hill in the wake of what had happened with Dr.
Ford and Justice Kavanaugh.
And so when he brought the mob Word up again.
I call them out.
And listen, I don't want to be the word police.
And that was not my intention.
But I also believe in calling out talking points.
And to hear him bring that up, I had to say something.
I don't want to be the word police, but.
She said, you know when they say but, it means the opposite of what I just said.
Well, I don't, I support free speech, but.
And so, okay, but fair enough.
She says, I think those talking points, they're shallow, they're cheap, and I'm not going to let people get away with talking points on my show.
Ain't going to happen, right?
Hold on, let's cut back a few weeks or a few months.
Are you sure about that, Brooke Baldwin?
She made a determination with her doctor that she would power through this.
She made a decision to just power through this.
We've decided to power through sometimes.
Just power through this.
Continue to power through it.
Yes, she tried to power through it.
She decided to power through it.
Well, you know, Brooke, she just wanted to power through.
She just wanted to power through her schedule.
So she wanted to just power through and keep doing it.
I appreciate all of her desire to power through.
To power through and get things done.
She tried to power through it.
It was Hillary Clinton's decision essentially to power through.
Yeah, Brooke.
And Brooke supports her powering through, because she powers through.
Brooke powers through, too, I think.
I think Brooke likes to power through certain talking points, but doesn't want to power through other talking points, because she's a hack.
I mean, obviously, you could pull up this kind of footage.
And the thing about power through, I mean, you had Robbie Mook, the Clinton campaign chairman, pushing this line.
Whereas on Brooke's show, when they were talking about...
The mob mentality of the left right now.
You had Matt Lewis, who's just a writer for the Daily Beast.
He's actually a left-wing publication, and he's making the point that they actually are calling for mob violence.
Maxine Waters is calling for mob violence.
Democrats around the country are using mob violence.
And she says, you can't use that one.
Now, if you were talking about Hillary powering through, all right, maybe we could get along with that.
So they're getting sloppy.
The left is getting sloppy now.
This has been the case since, basically since Donald Trump announced he was running for president, certainly since November 2016.
So, we're also seeing this in big tech.
So, it's not just the politicians.
It's not just the media.
It's also in big technology.
Twitter, at this point, I think, has no even remotely plausible claim to being fair, to treating the left and the right fairly.
This happened within the last couple days because of one Louis Farrakhan.
Louis Farrakhan, you know, the Nation of Islam...
If anybody is a hate monger in the United States, it's Louis Farrakhan.
He talks about the white devil.
He talks about the satanic Jews.
He's a race hustler for black people.
And by the way, he actually took a photo with Barack Obama in 2005 that the mainstream media buried.
They would not let this be released during the presidential election because Farrakhan is such a wicked dude.
He's such a hate monger and he's such a race hustler.
So Farrakhan, though, still is allowed to have his Twitter account.
Twitter doesn't mind.
He posted a tweet that said, I'm not anti-Semite, I'm anti-termite, along with this video clip.
Now, white folk don't like Farrakhan.
Some of them respect me.
But those who have been our deceivers, they can't stand me.
So when they talk about Farrakhan, call me a hater.
You know what they do?
Call me an anti-Semite.
Stop it!
I'm anti-termite.
Do you get it?
What he's saying, the Jews, according to Louis Farrakhan, are like bugs that eat away at wood in your house.
Did you get it?
Just in case you didn't get it, because that's Louis Farrakhan, he's allowed to have his Twitter.
Meanwhile, Alex Jones...
All Alex Jones is doing is warning people that, you know, the frickin' frogs are turning gay.
All he's trying to do is shirtlessly sell vitamins to people.
He loses his Twitter account.
Gavin McGinnis, who just wrestles babies, I think his biggest crime in life is that he wrestles newborn babies.
He loses his Twitter account.
But Louis Farrakhan, who calls Jews termites, he gets to keep his Twitter account.
That's how it works.
Because those two guys, Jones and Gavin, are considered broadly within the right wing.
Jones a little less so, but Gavin is.
And Louis Farrakhan is considered within the left wing.
So they let Louis Farrakhan keep his Twitter account.
What this is showing is that nothing ever changes in politics.
It's showing that big tech is now taking over the role of the mainstream media in censoring conservatives.
For decades and decades, the mainstream media...
Not only censored conservatives, but they would let conservatives go on their shows and then only present them in the way that the left wanted to present them.
So they'd distort what they had to say, they would pervert their messages, they would always filter conservative thought through the lens of the mainstream media.
New media and big technology allowed us to get our message out there unadulterated.
That's how you're seeing a show right now, probably.
But more and more, YouTube will censor those shows, will demonetize those shows.
Facebook, same thing.
More and more, Twitter will cancel the accounts or censor the accounts or suspend the accounts of conservative people and not do the same on the left.
They are now taking over the role of the media in censoring conservatives.
I like this story in a certain sense because it means that politics is never over.
The left is always coming out to get you, and the empire is always striking back, which, you know, fair enough.
That means you've got to stay on your toes.
There's nothing new under the sun.
And it means that we have to innovate.
You know, part of the reason, I think, that Republicans and conservatives have had an advantage here is because there's all this pressure to innovate, to innovate on policy.
Conservatives have been leading on policy.
For certainly my entire lifetime and before, the left has no policy ideas.
The only policy idea is to go back to 19th century socialism.
That's the left's big policy idea.
But all of the think tanks are conservative.
All of the actual policy centers are conservative because there is a pressure on us to innovate.
Same thing with new media.
Conservatives dominate new media.
Why do they dominate?
Because there's a pressure on us.
We have to do it or else we can't get our message out.
And now conservatives are going to have to innovate again.
You know, we had a good run...
In this iteration of social media, we're going to have to keep innovating again.
All of this is a little bit of a sideshow.
All of this is a little bit of what's going to happen in November, what's going to happen in the midterms, what's going to...
Very few people are talking about what is happening right now in the levers of government, and this underlies a totally false attack from the left and the right on Donald Trump, which is that he's too sensationalist, he's too much of a showman, I just want him to, you know, sign tax laws or whatever.
I just want him to tweak parts of the welfare state.
Okay, right.
When he does that, no one would cover it.
He would have no ability to galvanize public support on those issues.
Here's one example of it.
During a cabinet meeting, President Trump made a pretty big announcement, gave a pretty big directive to his cabinet secretaries, which I am certain you haven't seen anywhere, but it's very important.
Here he is.
I'm going to ask everybody to come back with a 5% cut for our next meeting.
I think you'll all be able to do it.
There may be a special exemption, perhaps.
I don't know who that exemption would be.
If you can do more than five, some of you will say, hey, I can do much more than five.
I'm sorry, I was doing my Ruth Bader Ginsburg impression while I was watching that cabinet meeting because nobody's watching this, and nobody's watching it because while it's very, very important, it's not a show, so people aren't going to cover it.
It's Donald Trump at a cabinet meeting saying, you know what we need to do is cut these departments by 5%.
If we cut them by 1% year over year over year, for a number of years, we would have a significant reduction, certainly in the growth of the federal government, if not in the federal government itself.
Trump is saying we're going to do even more than that.
We're going to reduce it 5% within this year, and I'm sure we can do it.
Of course they can do that.
Nevertheless, nobody's going to cover that because it's actually Trump just holding a meeting.
One thing this shows us is that there is a serious Trump.
All we think is a covfefe and horse-faced Trump, but there is this serious Trump who, look, the guy's a workaholic.
He's built a lot of businesses.
He's risen to the top of very difficult fields.
Obviously, this guy...
Can work within normal business environments.
But because he's a showman, he understands that that's how you galvanize public support.
And we need the showmanship because this would not be covered.
This would not galvanize public support.
This would not get a win, even though it's extraordinarily important work.
And I just want to point out every now and again that very important work like this, deregulation, shrinking parts of the federal government, cutting back on certain costs, That is happening right now.
You're just not seeing it because it's not part of the show.
And probably it's good that you're not seeing that part of it.
It's probably good to have the media off here jabbering about horseface, which is totally trivial and doesn't matter at all, because what really matters is this, and we don't want the mainstream media's eyes on us shrinking parts of the government, and hopefully shrinking more of the government as the administration goes on.
The other good thing that President Trump has done for the office of the presidency is that he's made it less mystical, less majestic, he's taken less responsibility for every little thing that happens in the entire world.
President Trump was asked to give his thoughts on what would happen in the midterm elections.
Here's what he thinks.
If they don't go out and vote, then they have themselves to blame because they'll lose wealth.
Tremendous amount.
I've built up $11.7 trillion in wealth.
You report on it.
I've built up all this wealth in the country.
We've built up...
The economy's done so, so well.
If people...
Don't go out there and vote for Republicans.
They have nobody but themselves to blame.
I'd love this answer because during the Obama administration, all you would hear is, it's me.
I will make the sea levels lower.
We are the ones that we've been waiting for.
It's me, me, me.
I, me, my.
All through the night.
I, me, my.
You're doing his George Harrison impression.
Donald Trump actually doesn't do that.
For a guy who slaps his name on every building he's ever seen in his life, he actually says, look, all I can do is what I'm doing.
I'm just Donald Trump.
What do you expect from me?
I'm Donald Trump.
I deregulate, I cut taxes, I make the I make the country friendlier to businesses.
I make the government friendlier to business.
But you've got to go out there and vote.
I'm not going to do that.
I can't do that for you.
And if you don't want it, all right, that's your fault.
That's a good attitude.
Because you can't just throw all of your hopes and dreams, to quote Barack Obama, onto one guy.
Trump is not a god.
He's not a deity.
He's not a messiah.
He's Donald Trump.
Emphatically and manifestly not any of those other things.
And so we got him.
He's a great tool.
He's a great leader.
He's actually a great political leader.
He's a great political executive.
He's not a messiah.
You've got to go out and do the work of re-electing Republicans or you're not going to keep getting it.
And if you can't do it, you've got nobody to blame but yourself.
We have a lot of mailbag to get to right now.
Before we do that, though, I have got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Look, I know that we're probably already being censored on there anyway, so maybe you're on dailywire.com.
You've got to subscribe to Daily Wire right now.
Why?
One, because we're going to Politicon this weekend.
We're going to be at Politicon in Los Angeles on Saturday and Sunday.
I'm going to be there on Sunday.
If you're not in LA, if you haven't bought tickets, if you're not going to go, you can stream it on dailywire.com.
But you can only do that, obviously.
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Alright, here we go.
From Carlos.
Since you are a Catholic, I'm guessing you don't believe in same-sex marriage.
Do you also believe the government has the authority to make same-sex marriage illegal?
If so, what would be the arguments for doing so?
It's true that I'm a Catholic, but my opinion of the redefinition of marriage does not hinge on my Catholic faith.
It's not that I think that gay marriage should be legal or illegal.
I think gay marriage is a contradiction in terms.
This is no offense to friends of mine who are gay or who have any sort of sexual preference at all.
It's about what marriage is.
And unfortunately, during the question of gay marriage, when the Supreme Court stole it from the public sphere, we totally missed this debate.
The question isn't who should have the right to get marriage.
The question is what is marriage?
The people who support same-sex marriage say that sexual difference doesn't inhere in marriage.
Oh, you're a man or you're a woman.
It doesn't matter.
It has nothing to do with marriage.
Marriage is just, what is marriage, sir?
Well, you know, it's the union of two people who really like each other.
Okay, that could be friends.
Well, no, it's the union of two people who really like each other and have sex with each other.
That could also be friends, you know.
Welcome to 2018.
Well, no, it's the union, well, for this or that.
They can't quite give an explanation.
For all of human history, sexual difference has been the essence of marriage.
A union of husbands and wives, at least one husband, usually just one wife, sometimes more than one wife, depending on your culture.
In the West, basically, for a very long time, it's been one husband and one wife, because those two complement one another.
In the beginning, God created man.
Both male and female, he created them.
In our culture, in the Western culture, the husband and the wife leave their families, cleave together.
For what purpose?
Well, there's the logical possibility of life, of procreation, of creating a family, of the family being the essential building block of society.
The question that you have to ask yourself if you support Redefining marriage.
There are a few questions you have to ask yourself.
If you support redefining marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions, if you say sexual difference doesn't matter, is why not include polygamous same-sex unions?
Why?
I'm not trying to be offensive in any way.
Why wouldn't you?
If it's just about the union of people who love each other, I know polygamous and polyamorous people.
I wouldn't call them close friends, but they're acquaintances at least.
Why wouldn't that constitute marriage?
If sexual difference doesn't adhere in marriage, then what does marriage become?
What is it really about?
I've never heard a good answer to this.
Why should the Supreme Court decide that?
I don't know.
Marriage has a definition.
And the Supreme Court can't change that, and I don't think public debate even can change that, though I'd prefer if public debate did over the Supreme Court.
Marriage has a definition, and therefore, gay marriage is a logical impossibility.
Does it mean that gay people can't live together or do whatever they want or sign contracts?
No, of course not.
Go with God, man.
I'm not here to tell you how to live your life.
But it means that you can't change the word.
You can't change logic.
If we can't agree on definitions, we can't live together in a society.
We can't communicate.
So that's my position on that.
I guess now this is an unpopular position, even though virtually everybody in the entire West held it until just a few years ago.
I think that our current...
A misunderstanding of the definition of words is a momentary madness.
I think at some point we'll wake up from that.
But right now people are very confused, which is why you've got activists in the street shrieking and howling.
It's because they're very confused and they can't articulate their points of view.
From Joseph.
Dear Michael, the world has ended.
Civilization as we know it has collapsed and been reset.
You are one of the few who have survived this disaster.
So what three items, besides the Bible, would you take with you into this new world?
Why?
Thanks, and by the way, I don't think you are execrable.
Well, you know, probably a purple mattress movement watch and a week of blue apron.
That's what I'd take into the world.
Promo code COVFEFE, baby.
Beyond that, if I had to choose another three, I would choose...
This is very hard.
These questions are always impossible.
But to reconstruct civilization, I would probably choose...
I would bring Dante.
The Divine Comedy, Annotated Divine Comedy, because the Divine Comedy includes basically all of Western culture, is referred to in it, or alluded to, or brought in together Western Christian theology and philosophy, and ancient philosophy, and literature, and it's the greatest work of art in the West.
So I'd take that.
I would take Shakespeare.
Specifically Hamlet, because Hamlet is talking about the crack-up of Western civilization, probably the thing that sowed the seeds for what led to that apocalypse that I'm now trying to recover from, and all the works of Shakespeare, and probably Aristotle.
So I would take literature, I would take really extraordinary literature and theology, literature and philosophy.
I wish that we could get a little history in there too, but you said I could only take three things.
From Spencer.
Oh Knowles, who knows?
In your opinion, how can we best discover God's will for our lives?
How can we distinguish God's will from what merely happens to us?
More specifically, how can we know whether or not we've acted in accordance with God's will when we make crucial decisions such as where to go to school, whom to marry, where to work, etc.?
Spencer.
It is a wicked generation that looks for signs and wonders, as the Bible tells us, but it is a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders.
So you shouldn't, you know, be trying to interpret tea leaves when you're trying to figure out if you should go to this college or marry this person or whatever.
However, I think we've all, many of us have had numinous experience.
The experience of Coincidence or providence or whatever that really makes you think, huh, this has the unmistakable mark of God on it.
When these things happen, they don't always give you a right answer.
Often these experiences, these religious experiences, are ineffable, so they're really hard to relate in words what they are.
But, you know, it's like pornography.
You can't define it, but you know it when you see it.
I mean, that's the only way it's like pornography.
So what I would say, when I've had these experiences, when friends of mine have had these experiences, while we're trying to make certain decisions, I don't interpret them to mean one course of action or the other or this or that.
I always take them to mean that God is there and that maybe you're on the right track.
Maybe you're where you're supposed to be because you're seeing a sign or a wonder.
For all the rest of it, you should use your reason.
You should use your desire and your will and your intellect and pursue the virtues, you know?
I mean, it's on you, man.
It's your life.
You've got to lead your life.
And fortunately, there is the grace of God that abounds and that will help you out and lead you in the right way, and there's the helper and the advocate.
But it requires your own will as well.
So you can't look to signs and wonders to be an excuse not to use your own faculties of reason and your own determination and courage and will and all the other virtues.
You've got to do that.
But in a way, don't worry about it so much because God is there.
But you've got to put in the effort and you've got to put in the work.
And just remember, in the long run, as long as you're doing the right thing, you can't go wrong.
From Anne.
Hi, Michael.
Just found out that the leftists are using the Lord's name in vain.
They always do that.
Claiming Jesus is a Palestinian.
Please explain this rhetoric.
Anne.
Oh, it's because they're very dumb.
I think that's why they're calling Jesus a Palestinian.
For a while they were saying Jesus is black or Jesus is...
It's always just to be used in political debates.
So when there was a political debate in the United States over black and white race relations, they would do that.
Now there's a big political debate over Israelis and their treatment of Palestinian Arabs.
And so they're saying Jesus was a Palestinian.
He wasn't.
He isn't.
He isn't a Palestinian.
Christ is a Jew.
He partook of Jewish customs.
He did Jewish things.
He taught in the temple.
He died for your sins and was resurrected on the third day.
But he's not a Palestinian.
The point that they're trying to make is always this cheap political point.
They say, Jesus is a socialist.
And you say, well, why do you think that?
They say, well, because I saw a meme about it on Reddit one time.
They say, okay, can you explain, can you give any example of Jesus being a socialist?
And they never can.
So I think the people who are saying Jesus is a Palestinian...
Look, just to use the phrase, Jesus was, is...
If you do that enough times, you're kind of showing your cards because the...
For those of us who believe in Jesus, Jesus is.
Before Abraham was, he is.
But also, they just haven't read the Bible.
The people who tend to preach the most about these things politically tend to have never cracked the spine of the Bible, so I would just laugh at them.
They'll come up with some new one when there's a new political issue as well.
Hi, Michael.
Do you believe in the deep state?
And if so, what do you think about it?
And how do you think it's affecting our government and democracy?
From Caleb.
Okay, he didn't put his name up top.
Yeah, by definition, the deep state exists because the deep state is the entrenched federal bureaucracy that is unaccountable to voters and that can't be moved along by elections.
So that does exist.
I don't think it's like men twirling their mustaches in a bunker.
For the most part, there are those types.
I mean, there are those guys...
Some of the FBI guys, Peter Strzok, actually when he was testifying before Congress, he did look like a villain from a James Bond movie.
But most of them are just bureaucrats who are so entrenched and the government is so bloated and big and powerful and unaccountable That elections don't matter because the elected officials come and go, but those bureaucrats live forever.
You know, bureaucrats have come closest to finding the philosopher's stone and immortality on earth.
It's virtually impossible to fire them.
James O'Keefe's videos quoted a bunch of DOJ officials saying that.
We can't lose our jobs.
So that does exist, and the way to fight that is to shrink the size of the federal bureaucracy.
The Trump administration has done a beautiful job at that.
Before they finally claimed Scott Pruitt, before they finally threw him out of office, he was doing an excellent job cutting the size of the EPA. And hopefully we'll be able to continue that, because bureaucracies are naturally going to do this.
I don't even ascribe ill intention to a lot of these people.
It just naturally happens, and the only way to stop that is to shrink it, keep it small, and keep the government accountable.
From Aslan.
Michael, I've found debating points with the left is becoming far more taxing because they're so entrenched.
How do you pick and choose your battles, especially with people you respect as a friend?
Well, Kanye West is a good example of this.
Kanye West, you know, he came out, he gave his political opinion, which all of his friends disagree with, and they tried to guilt him.
They tried to shame him.
They said, your fans don't want this.
You're ill.
I'm worried about you.
But the racism, he said, you can throw out all the slogans you want.
It's not going to change my mind.
I would say two things.
I'm friends with a lot of Democrats.
You know, I've lived in New York and L.A. and went to a very left-wing school.
If I were not friends with Democrats, I wouldn't have that many friends.
One thing I always try to do with them is I never back down.
I never try to play nice and conciliatory and don't rock the boat.
I will exaggerate my political views, if anything, with some of them, because you don't want them to bully you into going along and agreeing with that.
If they're not going to like you because of your political point of view, you don't want to be friends with them anyway.
That said, though, I don't poke them.
I don't prod them.
I don't talk about politics all the time.
If they bring something up, I'll double down.
They say, oh, you know, Trump called Stormy Daniel's horse face.
Say, I know, it was so rude to Mr.
Ed to compare her to horses.
You know, it was so rude to all those horses.
And then maybe they can back off it or something.
Always, you know...
Double down.
Don't let anything go unanswered.
But you don't need to poke them all the time.
Because why are you friends with them?
You're presumably friends with them because you share some points of view.
You share some values.
You share some activities together.
You like them.
And so you don't want to prod them.
You don't dislike them.
But never back down.
Never back down.
The real way is don't pick any battles to begin with.
If a battle is picked with you, though, you fight it right back.
From Augustine or Augustine.
Mike, my very liberal economics teacher, says the Trump tax cuts are awesome in the short run, but not great in the long run due to problems and the large debt that large debt can cause down the road, and the tax cuts do not really help that issue.
How do I respond to this?
AMDG. Okay.
Well, first of all, to quote a famous liberal economist, John Maynard Keynes, in the long run, we're all dead.
No, they're great in the short run, and they're great in the long run, and the debt is a problem.
All of those things can be true.
Your teacher is right that the debt is a major problem.
Not a problem primarily caused by Republicans, by the way.
The debt and deficit under Barack Obama expanded dramatically.
You had regular trillion dollar deficits.
And President Trump has not tackled that problem yet.
The main response, I would say, is that tax cuts don't cause the debt.
Entitlements cause the debt.
Entitlements are the majority of the federal budget.
They cause the debt.
They are the main driver of the debt.
They are insolvent.
They will make the debt worse and the deficits worse if they are not checked.
It is Democrats who are not allowing us to address those entitlement programs.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, which will bankrupt the country and won't be there for the young workers who are paying into it right now.
Tax cuts don't do that.
Tax cuts let people keep a little bit more of their own money.
That's fine.
That's perfectly fine.
And they can stimulate economic growth.
If people are serious about taking on the debt, you're not going to do it by raising taxes, because that also could damage the economy.
You're not going to do it with pork barrel spending.
That's another favorite buzzword of the left and the right.
You're not going to do it by eliminating some bridge project somewhere or whatever.
You're going to do it by tackling the The lion's share of our budget and the main driver of debt, and that's entitlement programs.
Show me someone who has the guts to deal with entitlement programs, other than Paul Ryan, who now has had his career basically finished in the Congress.
Show me someone with that courage, and I'll vote for that person.
But I don't see it anytime soon.
Time for one more?
All right, time for one more.
from Elan.
Should we believe all men if gender equality is our goal?
Thanks.
What a great question to end on.
You know, just, wow.
We should believe all women, and because women are equal to men, we should believe all men.
And therefore, we shouldn't believe all women, and we shouldn't believe all men.
We should believe credible people and give the accused the presumption of innocence until they're proven guilty.
Wow, man, that is some poetry.
I'm going to have to tweet that out.
Okay, that's our show.
We're going to be back tomorrow for a Friday show because I ditched you on Tuesday to go give a speech.
So, tune in 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 Semia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Bory.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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