A man has been arrested in connection with the slew of bomb packages mailed over the past few days. As the mainstream media jumps to blame Donald Trump, the New York Times buries one important detail about the bomber. Then, all the polls that matter 12 days out from the midterms, why only leftists can dress in blackface, and the caravan is on its way, I can hear Honduran gangsters play. Finally, the Mailbag! Date: 10-26-2018
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A Florida man has been arrested in connection with a slew of bomb packages mailed over the past few days.
Of course, why didn't we think of it first, a Florida man?
It makes perfect sense.
As the mainstream media jump to blame Donald Trump, the New York Times buries one very important detail about the bomber we will discuss.
Then, all of the polls that matter 12 days out from the midterm elections, why only leftists are allowed to dress in blackface, And the caravan is on its way.
I can hear Honduran gangsters play.
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
More bombs.
More bombs being delivered.
They finally got the guy.
He seems like a total weirdo, as you might imagine.
We will analyze.
And not only will we analyze this guy and the bombs and possible motives, we will analyze the media's reaction to all of it.
But first...
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Let's talk about the bombs.
They got this guy.
They arrested him.
Honestly, there are more questions than answers at this point, but good job on law enforcement for tracking him down.
It was reported at first that he was a white man.
Now it is being reported that he is Native American.
Although, as Senatrix Elizabeth Liawatha Warren taught us last week, even if you're entirely white, you still can be Native American.
So we haven't figured out exactly which it is yet.
But the guy seems like a total looney tune.
Obviously, he's just accused right now.
But if it's him, he's made bomb threats before.
In 2002, he threatened to blow up the Florida Power and Light Corporation and said that it would be worse than 9-11.
He's apparently not very good at making bombs.
He's been arrested many times before for theft and burglary.
So, definitely seems like a weirdo.
There are some questions to be raised here.
One is why none of the bombs worked.
None of them.
I mean, this guy, I'm glad to say, Mirabile Dictu, is the worst bomb maker ever.
He's just not good at it.
He's the worst bomb maker for a few reasons, actually.
One, because he might be screwing up all of the momentum going to Republicans in the midterms, and he's screwing up our jobs-not-mobs narrative.
But two, none of the bombs worked.
And this does raise some questions.
Why did none of the bombs work?
We were told by law enforcement that they were all sent through the mail, but the images that we've seen of some of the packages don't have any mail markings on them.
They seem that stamps were placed on them.
But it doesn't look as though they were processed by the post office.
Law enforcement is telling us that they were, but there are a lot of questions there.
So there were a few theories.
I felt there were four theories about who was doing this.
We still don't really know much about this guy, so I guess all of them are still in play.
The most generous theory for the left is that it's a wacky right-winger who doesn't want to cause actual harm.
So when he was found, he was found in, like, the creepiest van you could ever imagine, and the van had all of these stickers on it, all of these right-wing pro-Trump stickers on it, and they were all really nicely done, seemed quite new, and it seemed a little on the nose, not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, but you just think, all right, if you want a guy to seem like a right-winger, you know, you'd put all of these brand-new stickers, like, I voted for Trump, on it.
Um...
So I felt that was the most generous to the left, and probably, though, that's unlikely, that he doesn't want to cause actual harm.
I think the much more likely scenario, which is also pretty generous to the left in this, is that he's some wacky populist type on the right or the left, kind of like the Bernie bro who shot up the congressional baseball game.
This guy would be the Trumpy version of that.
And because all of the people that were targeted are establishment people, the Clintons, Soros, Eric Holder, John Brennan, you know, they weren't going after the Bernie Sanders side of the Democratic Party.
They weren't going after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
So I could see it, you know, as a populist type, and that's what the evidence seems to suggest now.
Then the less generous idea for the left is that it was some lefty who wanted to make conservatives look bad.
It doesn't seem that that's likely anymore.
But who knows?
Again, we don't really know anything about this guy.
Plausible.
I think it's still too wild, though.
And then the most conspiratorial tinfoil hat theory, the most, you know, they're turning the frickin' frogs gay theory, is that it's some plot, you know, by bureaucrats to undermine President Trump.
That also doesn't seem likely.
And the reason it doesn't seem likely to put a damper on some of my more conspiratorial right-wing friends is that there were so many states involved, there were so many law enforcement agencies involved, that if it were some grand conspiracy, I think somebody would have leaked it.
There would have been some whistleblower.
So again, I don't think that's likely.
It seemed to me number two or number three were the most likely.
Some wacky lefty or that it's some wacky Trump populist or left-wing populist.
Looks like that.
But we did forget the great possibility, the most obvious answer.
Somehow we forgot about it, which is that it's a Florida man.
You know, it's always Florida Man.
That guy, he must never sleep.
Florida Man just flits about doing the craziest things, including sending horribly constructed bombs to politicians.
And what's weird, too, about the bombs is that they had a digital clock on a number of them.
Some of them apparently weren't even...
Able to explode.
So we'll get to this in a second, because the New York Times even admits this and buried the lead.
But just to wrap it up on Florida Man, there was a story that came out last week about these two girls in Florida, an 11-year-old and a 12-year-old, who were Satanists planning to murder their classmates and eat them.
That's true.
That's not hyperbolic.
The story came out, here's a quote from the news headline.
When asked about motivation, the girls reportedly told police that they were Satan worshippers.
According to police, the girls planned to drink their victims' blood out of the goblet they were found with.
They also discussed eating their victims' flesh and leaving body parts at the school's entrance before killing themselves.
Florida man.
Florida girls.
These girls were 11 and 12.
Florida Man, right before Halloween.
By the way, for anybody out there who doubts the existence of personified evil, who laughs at people for believing in the devil or believing in personified evil, how do you explain that?
How do you explain 12-year-old girls who want to participate in a satanic ritual like that?
A little bit of a sidebar.
But Florida Man, unsurprising.
So we don't know a whole lot right now.
I do get a kick out of the fact that after these...
Multiple weeks of Liz Warren, the whitest woman in America, pretending to be a Native American.
This suspect may actually be a Native American, like a real Native American.
He apparently lists tribal affiliation in certain documents, so we'll have to see how that plays out.
But the one thing I think that we can all conclude, we know it for sure, is that this is Donald Trump's fault.
Right?
I think we have to conclude that.
Because, look, I've been watching a lot of CNN. I've been in airports a lot this week.
And when you're at airports, the only place that CNN has played in the entire world is on airport televisions.
And they told me it's Trump's fault.
Because apparently, I don't know if you know this, Trump has had a lot of violent rhetoric.
He's been very violent in his rhetoric.
He's calling for a lot of violence.
And have you heard?
I mean, I Googled it and I found a video.
Here is all the violent rhetoric from President Trump recently.
They go low, we kick...
And if you see anybody in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd!
And you push back on them!
And you tell them they're not welcome!
I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country.
maybe there will be.
You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, Get up and please get up in the face of some congresspeople.
Is this the quote-unquote mob?
Wow, that's so weird.
Donald Trump sounds a lot like Spartacus, doesn't he?
I've never heard President Trump sound so much like tears of rage Spartacus.
Oh, no, wait a minute.
That wasn't Donald Trump.
That was all Democrats.
That was all major Democrat officials, including their most recent presidential nominee, calling for violence.
Nevertheless, all we're hearing from the mainstream media is that President Trump has created a culture of violence.
We'll get in a minute to why that is so insidious.
But here is what Donald Trump is actually saying.
More broadly, there's much we can do to bring our nation together.
For example, those engaged in the political arena must stop treating political opponents as being morally defective.
Have to do that.
The language of moral condemnation and destructive routine These are arguments and disagreements that have to stop.
No one should carelessly compare political opponents to historical villains, which is done often.
It's done all the time.
Got to stop.
We should not mob people in public spaces or destroy public property.
He's exactly right.
It was exactly what he should have said.
Got it right.
Who could possibly object to it?
We know who does.
CNN and the New York Times object to it.
We'll get to that in a second.
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President Trump is exactly right here.
He's exactly right.
The media have been egregious about all of this.
First of all, he's right that we should all come together.
He recently just gave a statement, too, just within the last few moments on how we'll...
We have to prosecute this guy to the fullest extent of the law.
We cannot have political violence take hold in the United States.
Obviously, political violence takes place on the right and the left.
It's taken place a lot more on the left these days.
But, you know, maybe this guy is a right winger.
I don't know.
I haven't decided how far down the conspiratorial rabbit hole I want to go, but let's take everything at face value.
Let's say he's a registered conservative Republican.
He subscribes to the National Review.
I don't know.
Whatever it is, let's say that he is an actual Republican.
Look at the response from politicians.
That's what actually matters here.
When the left was being violent, going to Republicans' houses, going to assault them in public, at restaurants where they eat, where they sleep, how did the Democrat Party respond?
They encouraged it.
All of them, so many of them, Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Cory Booker, they encouraged the violence.
When there's some wacko Republican who sends poorly made bombs that fortunately didn't hurt anybody, when that happens, how did the Republican leader respond to that?
He said, we've got to prosecute this guy to the fullest extent of the law.
We can't have any political violence in America.
Two starkly different responses.
You can't control everybody.
Obviously, people are going to be wackos.
Let's say this guy is a registered, hardline, conservative Republican.
Who knows?
If he is, it seems more like he's a wacky criminal Florida man, but let's say that he is, fine.
What really matters is how the parties are responding to it.
The left, the mainstream media, which is just the talking, the microphone, the loudspeaker of the Democratic Party, they're encouraging the violence.
The conservatives and Republicans are discouraging the violence and encouraging, prosecuting people who commit violence.
Absolutely.
CNN today, before they caught the guy, they ran a headline.
This is maybe the most egregious one I've seen In the last week.
I don't know.
CNN always outdoes themselves week over week.
Take a look at this clip and just look at that Chiron.
We definitely see a pipe-shaped figure in the x-rays.
We definitely see wires surrounding and within the devices themselves.
A clock.
That clock could have been used to actually activate the device.
One thing I'm not seeing in the x-rays, and I'm just seeing my x-rays on So you see that there, quote, 10 packages sent to Trump targets.
Trump targets.
What do they mean?
They mean Democrats.
There were 10 packages sent to Democrats, but they say Trump targets as if Trump is there masterminding the bomb plot.
That's the implication.
That's what they want their viewers to take away.
That's plainly what the language says.
Trump has targeted these people, and now this guy is sending poorly constructed bombs to them.
And that's just a flat lie.
And the New York Times complains when we call them fake news.
They say, we're an apple, we're a banana, whatever that commercial was.
That is fake news.
That's a lie.
And it's libel.
That is true calumny against the president.
The New York Times was a little better.
Their headline was just as egregious.
But you've got to watch how the New York Times writes.
So the New York Times headline on this was, quote, Pipe bombs sent to Democrats and Trump critics.
What we know and don't know.
Yeah, that's true.
Trump critics, sure.
They could have just said, Pint Bombs sent to Democrats, because all the Democrats are Trump critics.
Every single one.
Can you name a Democrat who isn't a Trump critic?
No.
But they wanted to get that in there to link Trump to it.
At least it's a little better than CNN. But the way the New York Times writes is they bury the lead.
They do it as the structure of the newspaper.
They always have the most sensational propaganda on page one.
And then they have all of their corrections on page 1075.
But...
What they do in the articles, too, is they bury the lead.
They have all their sensationalist propaganda, and then 25 paragraphs down, they give you the information.
So, I've skimmed this ridiculous article and then 25 paragraphs down or wherever it was, I read this, quote, "None of the devices have detonated, leading some officials to question whether they were designed not to explode or if they were even capable of doing so.
Some bomb technicians who reviewed photos of the device that circulated on social media on Wednesday suggested that it resembled the kind of fake device often portrayed on television and in movies." That's not from Daily Wire.
That's not from some right-wing website.
That's from the New York Times admitting as much.
Very good.
Then they go on and they say, law enforcement officials determined all of the devices were likely sent through the mail.
This does raise questions about why we didn't see processing on those packages.
But even the New York Times admits this may have been some sort of a hoax.
Now, what was the motivation of the hoax?
Was it a hoax to have some political effect on the midterm elections?
Was it a hoax to scare Democrats?
It easily could have been that sort of hoax.
We just don't know.
We should wait to get those answers.
But...
I'm very pleased that in the reactions to it, Broadly speaking, conservatives have been sane, have been grounded.
I said the other day on the show, you've got to remain calm and remain clear, especially when things get really heated.
Because when people get emotional, when they get angry, when they start jumping to conclusions, they go mad and they make mistakes.
Don't make mistakes.
We're 12 days out from an important election, so you've got to stay clear-headed.
And I'm glad that the president has refrained from being sensationalist about this.
He said exactly the right things, and let's hope that conservatives continue to do that.
We also have seen Megyn Kelly get fired.
I go away for one day and the news media falls apart.
There are bombs going around the country.
Megyn Kelly, former darling of Fox News, got into a spat with Donald Trump, actually, during the 2016 election.
Goes over to NBC for a record contract over there.
She's out.
Why is she out?
She's out because during a program, She asked the question of whether or not it's okay to darken your skin in a Halloween costume to pay tribute to somebody.
So somebody on The Real Housewives dressed up like Diana Ross, you know, and she darkened her skin a little bit.
This caused an uproar.
And Megyn Kelly said, well, is it really blackface if you admire the person?
Who doesn't like Diana Ross?
Is it okay or is it not okay?
She makes those comments.
People pretend to be outraged.
Nobody's actually outraged.
People just pretend to.
And then she apologizes.
She said, oh, I didn't realize it would cause that stir, but I see that I was wrong.
And then they fire her.
They can her.
For reaction, we now turn to NBA Hall of Famer Carl Malone.
Sometime at night, Karl Malone will look up in the sky and say, what the hell going on up there?
Do UFOs live on another planet, phoning home like E.T.? Karl Malone will read on TV about white people getting deducted by aliens, sticking all kind of hell up their butt, and that's a damn thing.
Now, Karl Malone never seen no flying saucer himself, but if he do, that's going to be a spooky time.
That's why Karl Malone say, government got to step up and give 102% to keeping them little green man off this here earth.
Because the day them dudes stick something up Karl Malone, but, that's going to, well, that ain't going to be no good time for nobody.
Especially Karl Malone, but.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That wasn't Carl Malone.
That was Jimmy Kimmel wearing blackface.
That was Jimmy Kimmel wearing blackface specifically to put on a minstrel show.
This is not him putting on Carl Malone's skin tone because he's admiring Carl Malone or talking about what a great guy Carl Malone is.
He does it here to make fun of Carl Malone for being stupid and to make fun of him for speaking in Ebonics and for speaking inarticulately.
If anything, is a minstrel show, a modern-day minstrel show, that is it.
So he does this, but Jimmy Kimmel, he's the toast of Hollywood.
Jimmy Kimmel, he's the host of the Oscars.
Jimmy Kimmel has a late-night show.
Now, at the time, that was on Comedy Central.
And what was it, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, that that...
Came out.
So he goes, he wears blackface.
No reaction whatsoever.
Including now, no reaction.
But fine.
You could say, well, it was a different time.
It was on a comedy channel that was always provocative.
And it was a cable network.
It's not the same.
So that's fine.
I do hear that point.
For reaction, for real reaction, we turn now to comedian Chris Rock.
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We got to ask that kind of question like, in 1981, how many grams of crack did Rick James smoke when he recorded Super Free?
Regis, you think the only way to get a brother on the show is to name it, who wants $50 cash and a pair of poopers?
Oh, no, wait, that wasn't Chris Rock.
That was Jimmy Fallon wearing blackface.
Okay.
Jimmy Fallon on NBC, on the network, that just fired Megyn Kelly for asking if it's okay to darken your skin for a Halloween costume if you admire a person.
That is Jimmy Fallon wearing blackface, putting on a show, doing actually a pretty good Chris Rock impression, and no problem whatsoever.
He hosts, I believe, the longest running program in television history, The Tonight Show, on NBC. No issue, no problem, doesn't get fired, it's okay.
So why was she fired?
I don't think she was fired for this comment.
She was fired for her poor ratings.
Her ratings haven't been great.
She's being paid record amounts of money over there at NBC. I think they still owe her $69 million on her contract.
Even that, I think, doesn't explain it.
I think she's being fired because of her politics.
Not just that she's a conservative.
I don't know if she's really a conservative.
She's certainly more conservative than people at NBC. But she's gone pretty hard after NBC during the Me Too movement.
NBC has had a lot of Me Too experiences and certainly Matt Lauer.
Matt Lauer was the biggest example of this, would lock women in his office and harass them.
And she was pretty hard on this.
She went pretty hard after them, while other people on that network went very soft on Matt Lauer.
I think that's why.
I think it poisoned the relationship between her and NBC, because she wasn't gonna go soft.
She's a pretty hard-hitting journalist.
She left Fox after a very tense relationship with Donald Trump.
So she's pretty hard-hitting.
I don't think they wanted that.
I didn't think she was a good fit over there anyway.
I think she's better doing this hard-hitting journalism and being a prosecutor and going hard after people.
I don't think she should be Katie Couric.
She's a lot more interesting than Katie Couric.
So she's gone.
Who knows where she'll land.
Maybe she'll go back to Fox.
But the double standard is absurd.
She asked a question about blackface and was fired for it.
Jimmy Fallon, whom I like, who I don't think he should be fired for doing that sketch, but he actually performed in blackface.
And Jimmy Kimmel, who's on a different network, but he's still a late night star and he's still the toast of Hollywood, actually put on a minstrel show.
Actually did blackface in the way that blackface is described historically.
Actually did all of that.
No consequences whatsoever.
Hmm, he thinks politics has something to do with this.
Honing in on NBC, over on MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell listened to President Trump's speech the other day.
We talked about it on the show, where President Trump said, I am a nationalist.
I know you're not supposed to say that anymore.
It's not politically correct.
I am a nationalist.
Okay, we know what that means.
He's juxtaposing it with globalism, and he says, I'm going to protect the rights of Americans to govern themselves, American sovereignty, and I'm not a globalist.
When I say nationalist, it means I'm not a globalist.
But Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, he has the real name.
He knows what that really means.
Take it away, Mr.
O'Donnell.
Trump knows exactly why you're not supposed to use that word.
And that is why, exactly why he is using that word.
And by telling his audiences that he knows he's not supposed to be using that word, he is telling them that he is brave enough and bold enough to use the word.
He is brave enough and bold enough to use a 21st century variation of the word racist because he wants Trump voters to know that he hates the people they hate.
A majority of Americans reject all of this vile Trumpism.
All of it.
Nationalist apparently means racist to Lawrence O'Donnell.
Because to the left, anything they don't like is racism.
Racist is just the word that they substitute for evil.
They think of them as synonyms.
So they say, oh yeah, it's evil.
If Trump does it, it's evil.
Now, of course this isn't the case.
Moses was a nationalist.
Nationalism has a long history.
We talked to Yoram Hazoni, who wrote that great book, The Virtues of Nationalism.
One, the Democrat party is losing its hold on racial minorities.
And two, we're seeing the failure of globalism hurtling toward us in this migrant caravan that's coming toward the border.
This is a big, winning issue for the GOP and for conservatives.
If we can, can we check in right now on the migrant caravan?
Wow.
Wow. - Ow.
The juxtaposition.
The juxtaposition between that, oh, it's just the caravan.
It's the caravans painted red and white.
It's not.
It's actually painted with some criminals.
It's painted possibly with people who want to do harm to this country.
It's painted with cynical leftists who are going to exploit our extremely generous immigration policy.
That's what I think.
Whenever I hear this caravan, I just think like, la, la, la, la.
But that's certainly not what it is.
It's a horde of thousands of people invading this country, and we can't deal with it.
We don't want them to invade our country and have their first act in the country be to violate an important and essential law.
This is true of both parties.
And so it's a winning issue.
I mean, I think, you know, when people start calling you names, when people like Lawrence O'Donnell say, That's racism.
That's just racism.
That's how you know you're on to something.
Unless it's actually racial bigotry, but obviously this is not.
That's how you know you're on to something, because they're saying, that's evil, that's evil, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it.
He knows that this is a winning issue.
For conservatives.
He knows that this will get a lot of Americans.
This would have been a winning issue for Democrats 10 years ago.
Barack Obama was talking about this 12, 13 years ago.
He was saying we cannot have people come over illegally.
This is why, by the way...
A lot of people, I think, are skeptical or were skeptical about this bombing campaign of all the fake bombs that didn't explode or harm anybody because there are so many issues going so well for conservatives right now, right before the midterm elections, that this really throws a bizarre wrench into it for apparently no purpose at all other than some lunatic criminal Florida man.
But this is a big issue.
You've got jobs, not mobs.
Now the Democrats are going to turn that into mobs, not bombs.
I guess mobs are better than bombs, but mobs are not better than bombs if the bombs don't work.
So I don't know.
I have to do the math on that.
They also were running on the Kavanaugh effect, and they can also run on this migrant caravan coming.
Hopefully that won't be slowed down.
The momentum won't be slowed down by this...
We're going to have to see.
I mean, there's a lot of momentum moving.
We don't have any new polls, obviously, from after the arrest that just happened a couple hours ago.
But even in New Jersey, Bob Menendez, who had a safe seat, is now being seriously challenged by his GOP opponent, Bob Hugen.
Hugen is now within five points, within striking distance of Menendez.
And the Kavanaugh effect is really hurting Bob Menendez.
I don't know.
You know, he finally got off.
They weren't able to convict him of this.
But I'm sure that when they were saying, all that matters are the questions being asked, you saw Bob Menendez sitting in the Senate like, hey guys, I'm going to be over here at the coffee pot until you stop talking about this.
They're nailing him with these campaign ads.
Here's one of the greatest ads of the season against Bob Menendez.
Let the American people make their judgment, not whether the person's guilty or innocent, but whether the person deserves to have the office.
What about the underage girls who accused Bob Menendez, according to the FBI? Not whether he's innocent or guilty, this is not a trial, but ultimately, has enough questions be raised?
New Jersey's Bob Menendez is being forced to deny allegations of engaging with prostitutes.
Sex with underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic.
Is he the best we can do?
Good question, Senator.
It's time for Bob Menendez to go.
Brutal ad.
Absolutely devastating.
Well done to whoever the ad maker was.
We're not gonna have good numbers on this for a few days.
One, the arrest of the bomb guy was on a Friday, so you're hitting the end of the news cycle.
We don't really know that much about him.
I'm sure more is gonna come out over the next few days.
People are gonna be out of the news over the weekend.
People probably aren't going to be processing this until Monday, so you're probably not going to get reliable polling information on how this is going to affect the midterms until, I don't know, Tuesday or Wednesday at the earliest.
This is a little scary for Republicans.
All that matters are the trend lines when you're looking at polling.
It doesn't matter what the numbers are when you're two weeks out from the election.
It's all about the trend lines, because unless somebody starts sending bombs to people, And unless that really matters to voters, the trend lines aren't going to reverse.
The trend lines were all going in the GOP direction.
Who knows?
I don't know what's going to happen now.
If you'd asked me before they caught this bomb guy, and it looks like he's a populist right-winger...
Whatever that means.
He's obviously deranged, too, and probably living in a van.
But before that happened, I would have said everything.
It's unstoppable for the Republicans to stop this blue wave.
Now I don't know.
If the trend lines reverse because of this bomb thing, I can't see them reversing again.
It's hard to outdo a dozen fake bombs being sent around.
So we're just going to have to see what happens with that.
We've got to get to the mailbag.
But first, don't miss our next chapter of Another Kingdom, performed by little old me.
Today, it will be live streamed for the first 15 minutes of episode four, which is titled Worst Homecoming Ever.
Then you can listen to the audio, but subscribers to The Daily Wire can get Another Kingdom on Monday.
They get it several days early.
You get to watch the whole thing.
There's super cool art this year and cool sets.
So go on over there.
You need to subscribe too, because you'll get me.
You'll get the Andrew Clevin show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag, which we're just getting to.
You get to ask questions in the conversation.
You get a ton of stuff.
But you also get...
The Leftist Tears Tumblr.
That's not what this is.
This is a Grand Canyon University Tumblr.
I left my Leftist Tears Tumblr in Los Angeles, and I'm almost drowning.
They were kind enough to give me this Tumblr.
It was very sweet of them.
It's not cutting it.
This isn't built for Leftist Tears.
It can't sustain the high levels of salt, the high acidity of those Leftist Tears.
And even that sweetness, you know, it's like...
I don't know.
What is that type of corn, that popcorn where it's both sweet and salty?
That's what leftist tears are like, like kettle corn.
Go to dailywire.com.
Get yours.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
From Erin.
Hey Michael, I've been dating this girl for coming up on a year now and I have to say that objectively she seems like the kind of girl I should be proposing to.
Uh oh, here we go.
Where's this going?
But I find myself constantly with the urge to look elsewhere for female attention because I feel less and less attracted to her physically.
I don't want to be the kind of guy that breaks up with a girl because she's not the body type I'm looking for.
In a way, I think I'm looking for permission.
I'm permission to what?
I have permission to break up with her, is what you're saying.
I'm 22 if that info is necessary.
Okay.
You should break up with her.
That's the simple answer.
You should break up with her.
This is what you...
I know you tried to put it in this nice language.
What you just said to me is, in theory, I'm in love with this girl.
But in reality, I'm not.
Go for the reality, man.
You're going to be married in real life to your wife, and you should be physically attracted to her.
You really should.
I don't want to tell any tales out of school, you know?
I invite you into my boudoir enough when I'm selling you purple mattresses.
Sweet little Elise is a real looker, you know?
I mean, that's a big deal.
That's a big deal.
You're a man.
You have red blood.
You have to be attracted to your future wife or fiancé or girlfriend.
You have to be attracted to her.
That doesn't mean, by the way, that she's got to be a supermodel or she's got to have one particular body type or this or that.
That's not how attraction works.
You can find yourself extraordinarily attracted to some aspect of her personality that maybe overwhelms physical attributes that you're not as physically attracted to.
Okay, fine.
That totally makes sense.
But there has to be an attraction.
You're not starting a business with somebody.
That's not all you're doing, at least.
There's...
There's one part of marriage where physical attraction really matters.
So you can ask your parents about that one.
So you've got to be physically attracted to her.
That doesn't make you shallow.
You'll be physically attracted to someone else.
And it's not fair to her.
Like you're pitying her.
Like she's a charity case or something.
No, she sounds like a great girl.
I'm sure that she'll meet some other guy.
But if you really find that you're unattracted to her, then you shouldn't marry her.
Now maybe, I don't know, maybe you're exaggerating it, maybe it's this, I don't know.
Don't try to plan out your marriage on paper, like you're writing a doctrine, like you're, here's my marriage, this is what my marriage is going to look like.
There's that great Yiddish expression, Man plans and God laughs.
You know, Cole Porter didn't sing, let's do it, let's be in a relationship where you have all of these attributes that I think will go well in a wife.
He didn't.
He said, let's do it, let's fall in love.
That's what you should do.
You should fall in love.
If you haven't fallen in love, find somebody else.
From Wesley.
Hello to the execrable Michael Knowles.
Hey, Wesley.
Great job at Politicon.
I watched both your panels and you did an amazing job of staying composed when antagonized.
I occasionally have discussions with those on the left and I have a hard time staying composed when they fling lies and idiocy.
My question is, was that always part of your demeanor or did you have to learn it?
If the latter, how'd you go about that?
I usually keep my cool.
I've always been able to keep my cool, just about.
Occasionally I've lost my temper.
That's the Sicilian, I think, coming out.
But for the vast majority of my life, I'm able to keep my cool.
And this is a very important trait, and it requires practice, and you should do it, because being a man requires being a gentleman, and living in civilized society means that you need to be civilized.
So you should always keep your cool.
The other question, when you're talking to somebody about politics or philosophy or theology or whatever it is, What's the purpose of the conversation?
If I'm on a panel where people are being antagonistic and it's really sort of a debate, then I'll slam them.
I'll try to score points because I'm trying to demonstrate for an audience why their view is incorrect and why my view is correct.
If I'm sitting down having coffee and I'm just trying to talk to my friend and hear his point of view and give him my point of view, then I won't slam them.
I'll have a different demeanor.
In all of those cases, though, I am emotionally detaching myself.
When you get angry, you go mad.
When you go mad, you get stupid.
And you behave stupidly and you make stupid arguments.
So don't do that.
Part of the other reason why I keep my cool is that, as John Haidt showed a few years ago, the right understands the left much better than the left understands the right.
So I'm not usually surprised by arguments that people on the left are making.
I think I could probably tell them their arguments before they could tell me them themselves.
The left is surprised by what the right says because they don't understand the right.
So when you tell arguments to them, they don't really understand them or they haven't thought about them before, and they get very irate.
They get very angry about what they don't understand.
You should seek to understand it.
If you find yourself getting angry all the time, it might be because you don't understand their point of view.
So you should read up on it.
I assure you it's wrong, but you should read up on it at least so that you can tell that yourself and remain civil.
Other people yelling idiocy at you cannot degrade you.
Only you can degrade you.
Only you can compromise your integrity.
Only you can make yourself look foolish and humiliate yourself.
So don't do it.
Always stay composed.
Always be the bigger guy.
Be tough.
Be hard.
Bring him a fight.
But don't be nasty.
Don't be brutish.
That doesn't serve anybody.
From William.
Halloween is upon us.
Ofrid, Halloween is upon us.
And a very serious question arises.
Are ghosts real?
Love the X-Cribble show, William.
This is a very good question and hotly debated by theologians.
I tend to believe that ghosts are real, but I'll give you two fathers of the Church.
St.
Augustine, the guy who wrote City of God, Confessions, broadly he rejected the existence of ghosts.
St.
Thomas Aquinas, who wrote the Summa Theologicae, I believe that ghosts exist.
A ghost is a disembodied spirit, a disembodied soul.
Human beings are soul and flesh.
When you die, you lose your flesh, and the soul is separated.
At the end of time, at the end of the ages, at the second coming, we, Christian Christians, Theology states that we will be united, our souls and our bodies, and the redeemed will have glorified bodies, and things don't go as well for the people who are damned.
But, before the end of time, can a disembodied spirit or soul come back and show itself?
From Scripture, certainly that seems to be the case.
We know that the transfiguration of Christ, he's standing up there with Moses.
Moses wasn't standing there in his flesh, was he?
That was a disembodied spirit.
We know that...
Angels can manifest themselves.
Demons can manifest themselves.
In Christian theology we see this.
So I tend to side with Thomas Aquinas, but I don't go looking for ghosts.
Also because there are spirits in this world.
I know it's very unfashionable to say that in our materialist times, but there are spirits.
There are principalities and powers.
There is spiritual wickedness in high places.
There is personified evil, and there is personified good.
So don't go looking for ghosts.
Don't go trying to communicate with the dead.
Don't go trying to talk to demons.
That story about Satanism in Florida where the 11 and 12 year old girls are going to murder and eat their classmates as a sacrifice to Satan, that should remind you that there is personified evil in the world.
Don't go looking for it.
Just keep your eyes up looking at God and do the right thing and don't be worried about where you're going afterward.
And watch out for ghosts.
From Robert.
Oh no, I'm sorry.
First question from Lewis.
Michael, knower of all the reasons to vote blue, will you be dressing as Rachel Maddow for Halloween this year?
Thanks, Lewis.
No, I'll be wearing a costume for Halloween this year.
From Robert.
Dear marginalized gnolls, do you believe the humans are created to need God?
If so, do you think this is why doing the wrong thing without God seems easier?
Humans are required to need God.
By definition we need God.
You didn't create yourself.
This is why libertarians sometimes go a little wrong in their ideology.
You did not create yourself.
You are not responsible for the creation of your life.
Your life is a gift given to you by your creator who is God.
So you do need God, and humans have a longing for God, a natural longing.
At all times, in all cultures, throughout all of history, we have a longing for God.
We have longings for other things, too.
We have a longing for food, and there's food to eat.
We have a longing for water, which is called thirst, and there's water to drink.
We have a longing for sex, and there are beautiful women walking down the street everywhere you look.
So it seems unlikely to me that we have a longing that doesn't find satisfaction in something.
Which is an argument for God.
This is also why doing the wrong thing is a little bit easier.
Part of that is because of the fall, because we're not perfect creatures, because we have free will and we've used our free will to reject God.
So it's easier in the short run.
It's always very tempting, but it doesn't work out well.
You want to and what we strive to do is to align our wills to the will of God.
But St.
Paul writes about this.
The things I want to do, I don't do.
The things that I don't want to do, I do constantly.
I do frequently.
And this is why mankind needs redemption.
But we certainly do need God.
Even if you're skeptical or doubtful of Christian orthodoxy or Judaism or any other religious tradition, it is simply a material fact.
You didn't create yourself.
You need God.
From James.
Mr.
Knowles, no matter what Shapiro says, I enjoy your show.
I need advice on running for local office in a difficult area.
I live in Portland, Oregon.
I want to run in local elections, but being under 25, Christian and Republican, basically means I'm ineligible.
How do I run for office in a hostile territory?
Why on earth do you want to do that?
Why on earth do you want to subject yourself, not just to politics, We're good to go.
And why would you want to do that when you're under 25?
You have a life.
You've got a life to live, man.
You can go out.
You can have fun.
You can make money.
You can talk to girls.
What are you doing?
Don't run for office.
Don't run for office.
Don't do it.
I'll give you some advice that I got from a prominent politician and a member of the current administration.
So I won't say who it is.
I was driving around with him in New Hampshire one time on a campaign and he turned to me and said, "You know, Michael, do you ever, do you want to go into politics?" And I said, "Well, you know, I'm in a car with you in New Hampshire, so what do you think?" And he said, "Okay, here's my advice.
Don't run for office when you're young.
Don't run for Congress when you're 25.
You'll ruin your family.
You won't accomplish anything there.
And you'll lose money.
You'll lose all your friends.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
You have to ask yourself, why are you running for office?
Is there one particular issue you want to solve in Portland, Oregon?
Is there this or is that?
Or is it just because...
You have some political ambition and you want to get up to a higher office and that seems like the thing to do.
If it's the latter, don't do it.
There are better ways to make an impact and there are better ways to have a life and there are better ways than to run for office right away.
And if you do want to run for office, which can be a noble calling, you should do it when you've got some experience and when you can do it yourself and you don't have to dial for dollars and you don't have to make yourself beholden to a lot of other interests.
Just my two cents.
Do we have time for one more?
I'll do one more.
We don't, but I'll do one more anyway.
From Patrick.
Knowles, I heard some person arguing the other day that people who are pro-life and are also for the death penalty are hypocrites.
How do you object to this?
Thanks.
Hashtag came for Ben, stayed for Knowles.
Yeah, good man.
It's a stupid point.
I don't know.
How do I respond to that?
How do I respond when people say to me, I don't respond to it.
I say, okay, yeah, that...
Has no semantic value you've just conveyed.
I think the confusion among people is from the slogan, pro-life.
It's a good slogan, and it says broadly what we mean.
But what we really mean is that we object to the killing in the womb of unborn babies without due process who are utterly innocent.
We object to that.
Of course we object to that.
There is no refutation of that objection.
It's an evil, awful thing that is indefensible.
So we object to that.
They say, well, but, so you support punishing criminals?
Yes, I support punishing criminals.
You think that the state has the ability, has the right to punish criminals?
Yes, of course, that's the definition of government.
That's the definition of a justice system.
Well, okay, you can punish them, but they shouldn't be able to kill them, should they?
Why is it?
It's okay for the state to take someone's entire life away, keep them in prison for 60 years behind bars in solitary confinement, but it's not okay to kill them.
If anything, death is a far more just and merciful punishment than life imprisonment or life in solitary confinement or something like that.
The latter actually is cruel and unusual.
At the time of the ratification of our Constitution, the punishment for a felony was hanging, was death.
That was virtually the definition of a felony.
Everyone had capital punishment, nothing unusual about it.
Keeping somebody in prison for 50 years, 30 years, whatever the sentence is, that is unusual, and I do find it cruel.
I think it's much harder to make the case for that than to make the case for the death penalty.
There are three different kinds of punishment.
Punitive punishment, rehabilitative punishment, therapeutic, trying to reintegrate them into society, and...
A deterrent punishment to try to deter other people in society from committing that crime.
Right now we only focus on rehabilitation.
We say it's the, we're going to rehabilitate these criminals.
Okay, that's fine.
But also justice demands punitive punishment and it demands deterrent punishment to protect the rest of society.
All of which are accomplished with capital punishment, including rehabilitation, because it focuses the mind precisely when you know you're to hang.
It probably changes your point of view and where you're looking and what you're prioritizing in your life.
So there's no contradiction whatsoever, and I think the confusion comes from that slogan, which is 98% correct, but you can clear it up by explaining precisely why you object to killing unborn babies in the womb, innocent of any crime, without due process.
Shouldn't take too long to explain that.
Okay, that's our show.
I'm going to Alabama on Monday, and we're going to have a very cool speech.
I haven't spoken about this topic publicly until this tour, and it is how to write nothing and sell 100,000 copies.
It should be a very fun speech, so check it out on Monday, but we'll have a show before then.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then.
The Michael Knoll Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
