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Dec. 10, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:55
Ep. 265 - I Sincerely Apologize For Those Things I Said

USA Today embraces the politics of personal destruction. Then, the Mueller investigation goes full witch hunt, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez identifies as a trans-Jew, and Brooklyn hipsters start a racially segregated yoga retreat in Costa Rica. Date: 12-10-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I would like to sincerely apologize for everything I've ever said.
I apologize to my friends, my followers, and everyone I've hurt and let down.
I should never have said those things that I said, but I did say them.
I'm not the man I was when I said those things.
Those things I said do not reflect my values or the man I've become.
The man I've become will be silent just as soon as I finish apologizing for saying those things.
I hope you can forgive this unacceptable error in judgment.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
It just occurred to me that if I were to stay silent for the rest of my show, this would be very in keeping with my number one best-selling political tome, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a Comprehensive Guide.
But I guess we'll have to talk before I can remain silent.
We'll have to talk about all of the apologies for things that people have said ten years ago as the USA Today embraces the politics of personal destruction.
Also, we've got to talk about the Mueller bombshell that was not a bombshell.
The Mueller filings in the Southern District of New York and the special counsel office memo as well.
We have to talk about James Comey all but admitting that the FBI set up the Trump campaign to be surveilled.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now identifying as a trans Jew.
That's actually my favorite story from the weekend.
A group of aggrieved leftists are taking refuge from white people in Costa Rica, which is a very white country.
And programmed students hate Clarence Thomas, but can't explain why they hate Clarence Thomas.
We'll get to all of that and more.
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Okay, so much to get to today, including everything that I've ever said, which I have to apologize for.
I'm sorry that I said it, because now we're not allowed to have any opinions.
This comes to us via USA Today.
There's this guy, Kyler Murray, who won the Heisman Trophy.
Now, what do I know about Kyler Murray?
Nothing.
What do I know about the Heisman Trophy?
Nothing.
What do I know about most professional sports?
Nothing.
All that I know is that USA Today decided that on the best day of this kid's life, when he won the Heisman Trophy, they were going to ruin his life by dredging up tweets that he sent out when he was 14 years old, in which he said mean things about gays or something, made a joke in which he said mean things about gays or something, made a joke
And now his life has to be ruined because he said something when he was 14 that is unacceptable according to today's standards, so his life has to be ruined.
Really awful.
They started this.
USA Today started this national shaming campaign.
And this was Scott Gleason in USA Today.
Shameless, awful thing.
Dirty, rotten thing that he did.
This is what he wrote about the kid in USA Today.
Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray had a Saturday to remember, but the Oklahoma quarterback's memorable night also helped resurface social media's memory of several homophobic tweets more than six years old.
Social media didn't help to resurface it.
You helped to resurface it.
This guy, Scott Gleason, resurfaced it so that he could get a lot of clicks on his article and destroy the best night of this kid's life.
And he decided to ruin it by dredging up six-year-old tweets that were about how he was making jokes about gay people.
Now, there are a couple aspects to this.
One, I can't believe that Someone was tweeting when he was 14 years old.
I've never felt older than that, that Twitter existed for a 14-year-old and he was sending out these tweets.
They were six years ago.
Who cares?
This isn't the only time we've seen this recently.
Kevin Hart.
Kevin Hart lost his Oscars gig.
Kevin Hart, comedian, done very well for himself, made it all the way up in show business.
He was offered the Oscars, and these monsters found a tweet that he sent out 10 years ago and found jokes that he told 10 years ago about how he didn't want his son to be gay.
And he likes gay people, but he didn't want his son to be gay, and this was the joke.
So the premise of that is that if a comedian has ever told a gay joke, He is now out.
He can't be hired.
He can't be employed.
He can't have a show.
He has to be ostracized from civil society.
Can you find me one comedian who has never made a gay joke?
Can you find me one human being who has never made a gay joke?
Or laughed at a gay joke?
Find me one person on planet Earth who hasn't laughed or made a gay joke.
None.
Of course none.
But it's this insane, Victorian, puritanical, neo-puritanical behavior that is now destroying this guy's career, kicking him out of the Oscars.
Obviously the question is, who cares?
Nobody cares.
We all have to pretend to care.
Because as the great playwright William Inge observed, if you marry yourself to the spirit of the age, you will find yourself a widow in the next.
So now, all of a sudden, the worst thing you can possibly do.
Is make a gay joke.
In the old days the worst thing you could possibly do was make a racial joke.
Pretty soon the worst thing you can possibly do is say that men are not women and women are not men.
If you question the transgender movement, already you'll be kicked off of social media.
And it's constantly changing.
They're always changing.
And if you try to keep up with that, you're going to fall apart.
Twitter makes this very hard because you can't see when somebody said something.
Even I've fallen victim to this.
You're looking and you read through somebody's tweets.
I saw this with Trevor Noah, the host of The Daily Show.
He made disparaging comments about Israel.
And when you see it on Twitter, it looks like he just did it.
But he didn't just do it.
He did it 10 years ago or five years ago, whatever it is.
And that time really does give you context because it means that you can never change.
A comedian has to change his act.
Someone like Kevin Hart has to change his act.
And I bet when he was telling those gay jokes 10 years ago, audiences were loving it.
Now audiences, they might not love those jokes, so he doesn't tell those jokes anymore.
Or as he says, he's apologizing.
He's a different guy.
He doesn't think that way anymore.
Whatever apology he had to give.
But in this world, you're never allowed to apologize.
Your apology is never good enough.
And actually, if you apologize, you're probably going to be destroyed because of it.
In the Me Too movement, we saw this.
The people who denied got to survive and continue in their careers.
The people who apologized lost everything.
Kevin Spacey hasn't been heard of.
In 18 months or something like that, he's gone to a desert island somewhere.
This is really insane.
The worst part of it, though, the part that I care about, because I don't really care about these Hollywood people or whatever.
It's sad to me, but it doesn't affect my life.
What affects my life is that this neopuritanism from the left...
It makes conversation terrible.
It destroys conversation.
I've seen this.
I'll get invited to various events that are not explicitly in the right-wing conspiracy, so I'll go out among everybody else.
I'll go to very left-wing events sometimes.
And one thing I've noticed at events that are populated primarily by left-wingers...
Not even bipartisan.
Not even people of differing political views.
Even events that are almost certainly all left-wing.
The conversation is terrible.
And the conversation is not terrible because the people are uninteresting or have nothing to say or don't have thoughts about things.
It's terrible because everybody is so afraid of being offensive.
To imaginary people.
Everybody is so afraid.
They're all walking on eggshells.
They won't say anything other than the most banal, bland, boring observations.
They'll talk about the chicken.
They'll say, oh, this is good chicken, isn't it?
Oh, yes, I like the chicken.
Yeah, it's very good.
They won't say anything.
They'll talk about their cats or something.
But they won't talk about anything, even remotely of substance.
Not because they can't, but because they're so afraid of the mob saying, you're not allowed to say that.
And...
It just makes the whole world bland.
Look, Kevin Hart was telling a joke about gay people.
His job is to tell jokes.
This other guy, the Heisman Trophy winner, Kyler Murray, I don't know.
I sort of on principle don't want to read his tweets because they should never have been dredged up in the first place.
It was a total hit job.
But...
Are we now saying that people can't disapprove of homosexual acts of homosexuality?
Is that what we're saying?
Basically every major religion for all of history has morally disapproved of homosexual acts.
I have a culture that does not, that actually disapproves of moral opprobrium, period.
And at various points throughout all of history, there has been various tolerance of homosexual acts for a period, and I believe in Renaissance Italy, the phrase il modo italiano, the Italian way, referred explicitly to gay sex in different parts.
So there have been obviously variously tolerant societies.
In ancient Greece, of course, there's the famous debate between the ancient Roman and the ancient Greek, and they're arguing over who has the best civilization.
And the Greek says, well, we built the Parthenon.
And the Roman says, well, that's true, but we built the Colosseum.
And then the Greek says, yeah, well, we invented soufflaki.
That's delicious.
They say, well, that's true, the Roman says, but we invented pizza.
Okay.
And then the Greek says, yes, well, I've got the trump card.
We invented sex.
And the Roman says, yes, but we opened it up to women.
And this, you know, obviously throughout the ancient world, they're all...
Fine.
Are you saying that right now you cannot disapprove of certain aspects of sexual morality?
Of course not.
Of course you can.
I want to hear some guy.
I want to hear from him.
If he says I hold homosexuality and moral opprobrium, yeah, I want to hear from him.
And then some guy who says all sex acts are great and you can do whatever you want, I want to hear from that guy.
And some guy who defends polygamy or some guy who opposes polygamy.
I want to hear from all of these things because this informs the way that I think.
It allows me to bat around different ideas.
And just to get off of these two specific examples of Murray and Kevin Hart, forget sex in the first place.
Let's talk about various political situations.
Let's talk about institutions.
Let's talk about various wars, various aspects of diplomacy.
I want to talk about everything.
That's what the right wants to do.
We want to battle around ideas and pick the best ideas.
What the left wants to do is censor everybody, from Twitter to the Heisman Trophy winner, all the way up to the Oscars.
It's awful.
It makes our culture very bland.
I don't like bland things.
I want diversity.
Before we get to the Mueller investigation, which we really have to cover, there are some bombshell non-bombshells that we have to cover.
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There was a bombshell Mueller filing that came out right at the end of the news cycle.
It was on Friday of last week.
Being reported breathlessly, hysterically, they've got Trump, it's Mueller time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
What do we actually learn from it?
We learn a few things.
The main takeaway that I found is that the Mueller investigation has a conclusion.
Which is that Trump is a bad guy and he should be removed from office.
I think that's the conclusion that they've reached.
I don't think they have anything to support that conclusion yet.
I think they started with their conclusion and they are working backwards.
They are filling in the blanks.
The reason that I think this is that this investigation was supposed to be about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Do you remember that?
Do you remember that was the whole point?
It's the Russia collusion investigation.
And now the only hope they have of getting this guy is on a campaign finance violation.
And even that is so weak.
It's so thin.
So let's start with that.
This is the best one that they've got.
Their best foot forward out of the Southern District of New York filing.
They said...
That, referring to Michael Cohen, the president's longtime lawyer, quote, Cohen himself has now admitted with respect to both payments to women, to cover up the affairs with women, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of individual one.
And individual one in these filings refers to Donald Trump very clearly.
They say in the filings, they say, individual one managed to win election to the U.S. presidency over Hillary Clinton.
You say, okay, I think I know who individual one is now.
Cohen has admitted that he paid off these women at the direction and in coordination with Donald Trump.
Okay, maybe he did.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.
I don't know.
What we know about this is that Donald Trump has paid off women for a long time.
This doesn't sound like a very good defense, but it actually is.
Because if Donald Trump paid off the women strictly because of his presidential campaign and because this was an important part of his campaign strategy, then it may have been an in-kind contribution to the presidential campaign.
And if Cohen made this in-kind contribution, and if Trump was spending this money, they could have violated certain campaign finance laws because they didn't disclose the nature of the donation.
Because Donald Trump, as the candidate, he can give basically as much money as he wants to his own campaign.
There's no violation there.
The violation would be if Cohen did it out of his own pocket.
If it was his own donation, and the other violation would be if it wasn't transparent, if they didn't make the donation clear.
Now, the reason why this is a very difficult case for the prosecution is that Donald Trump has been paying off women since before I was born.
Since I was a little glint in my father's eye, Donald Trump has been paying off women to avoid negative publicity.
And so as a result, you could say this isn't just about the campaign.
This is...
This is just the modus operandi of the Trump organization.
He would be doing this even if he weren't running for president.
Again, all of this sort of misses the point.
People don't go down for campaign finance violations.
Ex-Senator John Edwards in 2012, you remember John Edwards, he ran for president against Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008.
He got caught.
He was using campaign funds to pay off his mistress.
And this was a big scandal.
This was a much clearer cut scandal than Donald Trump paying off these women.
And even for ex-Senator John Edwards...
The prosecution couldn't convict him of the campaign finance violation.
He got off in 2012.
Does anybody really believe that an ex-Senator John Edwards, in a much clearer case, no questions of whether or not you can go after the president while he's in office, or this or that, or Edwards' history of paying off women.
If they couldn't even get John Edwards, do we really think that we're going to undo the 2016 election?
That we're going to remove a president from office because of a far less clear-cut version of this violation?
Of course not.
But what else about campaign finance?
They went after Dinesh D'Souza.
When Barack Obama was president, they went after Dinesh D'Souza for giving an extra $30,000 to his friend, Wendy Long, a candidate for Senate from New York who was never, ever going to win.
I was working races during that time.
He gave a little extra money to her.
It obviously made no difference.
And they threw him in the clinker.
They threw him in a, he had to go to a halfway house.
He was a felon.
He couldn't vote.
Donald Trump finally pardoned him.
Over nothing.
Over $30,000.
But what about the Obama campaign?
People don't remember this.
The mainstream media don't report on this.
But the Obama campaign was caught with nearly $2 million of illegal, non-transparent donations.
So during the Obama campaign for president, $1.8 million of donations where there were fake contribution dates.
They were exceeding the legal limits of it.
They were doing what Trump is accused of doing or what Dinesh D'Souza did on orders of magnitude, a higher scale.
And what happened to the Obama campaign?
Did Obama have to go to a halfway house like Dinesh D'Souza?
Did they threaten to throw Obama out of office like they're threatening to do to Donald Trump, take down the whole presidency?
No.
No.
Nobody went to jail.
Nobody faced virtually any consequences whatsoever.
The FEC fined the Obama administration $375,000.
$2 million in illegal contributions.
The FEC fined him $375,000.
Nothing.
A drop in the bucket.
And why is this?
One of the arguments against Trump that you see is they say there are all of these indictments against Trump associates.
There are all of these people are getting indicted.
And Obama people didn't get indicted.
Right.
Obama people didn't get indicted that much because the Obama Justice Department was corrupt.
Because it was run by Eric Holder, who's a corrupt politician, and by Loretta Lynch, who Drew Klavan calls blandly sinister.
Because of that, yes, that's true.
People weren't held to account.
That's right.
The DOJ, they didn't go after the Obama campaign for $2 million in illegal contributions.
Gosh, I wonder why.
I wonder why that is.
So, it's a totally selective issue whether or not they go after him.
But even then, it's so, so weak.
They're saying because Michael Cohen pled guilty to a campaign finance violation that now they've got Trump.
They don't have Trump.
Trump didn't plead guilty.
Michael Cohen's problem is Michael Cohen's problem.
If he pled guilty to something, it doesn't nab Trump on it.
So I think that one's the best they've got, basically.
Still, it's pretty weak.
Also pretty interesting in all of these filings is James Comey, then FBI director, admits now under oath that he used, the FBI used the uncorroborated Steele dossier, which was funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, as the evidence that which was funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, as the evidence that was required to get the FISA warrants to surveil So he's now admitting this under oath.
They used an unverified dossier.
It wasn't just unverified when they used it.
It was unverified months and months later when James Comey was fired to surveil the Trump campaign.
And how did the Steele dossier come around?
The Democrats cooked it up.
They paid for it, and then they used it as the way to spy on the Trump campaign.
That is pretty big news.
The only other thing that comes out of the Mueller filing is from the Office of the Special Counsel himself.
And I love this one.
The media have not reported this one at all.
From the filing on Friday, quote, the defendant, meaning Michael Cohen, Cohen did not follow up on this invitation.
So, in other words, if you got lost in all of that, some guy, some Russian guy, goes up to Michael Cohen and says, Trump and Putin should meet.
And then Cohen blows him off.
So, in the Mueller filing on Friday, you actually have evidence of non-collusion.
It's not just that you don't have evidence of collusion.
You have evidence now of them not colluding because Cohen didn't follow up on that invitation.
All of this leads to the question, is this all they've got?
Why is Mueller persisting when he's clearly got nothing on crimes with Russia?
And they're going after campaign finance.
Why is this?
I think this is just in the nature of the special counsel or the independent counsel investigations.
You're investigating these guys and you just grow to hate them.
One, you have to justify all of the money that's been spent on this investigation.
And two, when you're digging through people's dirty laundry, you realize what horrible people they are.
I have no doubt that Bob Mueller has read and seen a lot of things that make him think that Donald Trump is a no-good, dirty, rotten, terrible person.
Trump himself sort of admits this.
He's been in dodgy industries.
He says not being someone who drinks beer is one of his only good qualities.
He kind of admits this.
He said he's had kind of a wild life.
Okay.
And so what Mueller is trying to do is figure out a way to go back and fill in the gaps to let him reach the conclusion that Trump is a really, really bad guy and he shouldn't be in office.
That is not enough to undo an election.
That is simply not enough to undo a presidential election.
So I think for the right, basically this is good news.
They're going to go after him pretty hard on this campaign finance stuff.
It's very unclear if they can do it while he's in office.
It seems they can't do it while he's still the president.
So maybe they can do it once he's out of office.
But if he wins re-election, the statute of limitations will have passed.
So it's a really, really murky business.
And I think when you drill into the specifics, you see how totally cooked up and unfair the Mueller investigation is.
When you zoom out, that's really where you've got to look at it and say, what is the point of this?
What is the point?
Are we looking at Russian interference in the election?
Okay.
Why are we talking about Stormy Daniels and how many women Trump paid off in the 90s?
Oh, it's because you hate him and you want him out of office.
Not enough.
That does not justify an office of the special counsel investigation.
Speaking of women who are inserting themselves into politics in a strange way, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now a trans Jew.
In case you missed this, here she is.
One of the things that we discovered about ourselves is that a very, very long time ago, generations and generations ago, My family consisted of Sephardic Jews.
He's like, I told you!
I knew it!
I sensed it!
And the story goes, during the Spanish Inquisition, so many people were forced to convert on the exterior to Catholicism, but on the interior continued to practice their faith, continued to be who they were, even though they but on the interior continued to practice their faith, continued to be who they were, even though they were pressured It's never occurred to me that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be a Jew.
I've never had so anti-Semitic a thought in my life as to accuse the Jews of being the people of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
It's really awful that this is running.
Where did she say this?
She was saying this at a Hanukkah event at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.
So she's at some event for Hanukkah for a very left-wing group of Jews, and she's now decided that she is going to be Jewish.
People are making comparisons, obviously, to Elizabeth Warren, Liawatha Warren.
Ocasio-Cortez did this in a much smarter way.
Why is she doing this?
Well, because she said very anti-Semitic things in public.
She does not seem to be a friend of Jews or of the Jewish state.
She referred to Israel as an apartheid state, I believe, or at least implied as much.
She referred to the Jewish occupation of Palestine, Palestine of course being the fictional country to the east of Narnia and to the west of Wakanda.
And so she's got this kind of baggage on her.
So she goes there and says, you know, my ancestors were Jews.
I'm an ethnic Jew.
Is this true?
Probably not, but maybe, I guess.
She can take a DNA test, except she's probably learned a thing or two from Elizabeth Warren and she won't do this.
But this is an extension of the transgender ideology.
She can just say that she is, and it doesn't matter.
Elizabeth Warren came out, she said, I'm a Native American.
She used it for professional benefit.
She used it to advance her career.
She used it to pretend that she was the first Native American faculty member at Harvard or whatever she said.
And Ocasio-Cortez is not using it in that way.
She's just using it in this very nihilistic way, the way that words don't mean anything.
She's speaking at a At a group of Jews and she says, oh yeah, I'm Jewish somewhere back in the past.
And actually the logic of it is exactly the transgender logic because she says, my ancestors were on the outside Puerto Ricans or on the outside Spaniards or whatever, but on the inside, secretly, they were Jewish.
This is a logical extension of that sort of transgender ideology.
But the reason I bring this up Is not to make fun of her for that.
It's probably a fairly shrewd strategy to sort of plant the seeds in a way that takes away any accountability to actually be Jewish.
The reason I bring this up is because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has one of the greatest advantages in politics right now, which is that she is considered an idiot.
This is a big advantage.
Bill Clinton and George Bush were talking about this once.
They were on stage having a conversation between the two of them on the advantages of being underestimated.
President Bush, in different ways from me, but both of us, me because I tend to look like I'm real nice, and him because he used to make fun of himself.
You always want to be underestimated by your adversaries.
He consistently benefited by being underestimated.
And so did I, for totally different reasons.
This is so true.
You see Bush on stage, they're kind of laughing because Clinton is calling him, is saying that he appears to be stupid.
Not very nice, but it's true.
This is certainly what Bill Clinton said there is exactly true.
Bubba...
Bush benefited from being seen as a really nice guy.
He's not like Hillary.
I feel your pain.
That's his whole shtick.
Playing saxophone on Arsenio Hall.
Real cool, nice guy.
And Bush benefited from being perceived as stupid.
I mean, this was unbelievable that they called Bush stupid.
Bush, Yale graduate, Harvard Business School graduate.
He, you know, had a decent career in business, at least.
Was a successful governor of Texas.
When he was in the White House, George W. Bush had a game with some of his aides.
I think it was him and Karl Rove over who could read more books.
He's a voracious reader.
He has clearly a sophisticated inner life.
In his post-presidency, he's a painter.
And not just a painter, he's a pretty good painter.
There's that book of all of his paintings.
I have it on my coffee table.
It's very good.
Even New York Magazine, a left-wing outlet, admits that Bush is a pretty good painter.
He clearly has a sophisticated inner life, and people thought he was stupid.
I talked to people back in the day, back when Bush was president, who were not intelligent, who did poorly in school, who did not do well on tests, who were not academically gifted.
And they said, oh, I'm so much smarter than George Bush.
Oh, I'm so much smarter.
George Bush is an idiot.
Christopher Hitchens famously went on Bill Maher's show and he joked about this.
He said, you know, your audience is laughing at jokes about how George Bush is an idiot.
Anybody can make those jokes everywhere.
It's a joke for stupid people to laugh at.
All of your audience is mooing and booing and guffawing here, and not a single one of them is smarter than President Bush.
And he's right.
But Bush benefited from that.
It really helped him maneuver pretty well.
Ocasio-Cortez is benefiting from this.
She's clearly a pretty shrewd politician.
She managed to get herself elected to Congress at 28.
She upended a longstanding incumbent because she saw an opening.
She saw that he, Joe Crowley, had not been campaigning.
He hadn't really gone out there, pressed the flesh, made relationships with people in 10 years.
And so she said, I can go in there and fill that spot.
And she's done it.
She's become a darling of the Democratic Party.
She constantly attracts press to herself.
She's a fundraiser now for the party.
She's even been a threat to Nancy Pelosi.
One of her first acts going to Congress was to go protest in Nancy Pelosi's office.
This is a shrewd politician.
She doesn't know anything.
I don't want to belabor the comparison here.
She's not like George W. Bush.
She's not reading a lot of books.
I don't know how sophisticated her inner life is.
But she's a shrewd politician.
And we're all laughing at her.
We shouldn't underestimate this woman.
She's pretty crafty, she's pretty shrewd, and she's advocating a terrible, vicious, left-wing, extreme ideology.
And I think some conservatives want to take the attitude toward her, oh, ha-ha-ha, how funny, oh, tee-hee-hee, and that's fine, she is very funny.
We do that at our own peril.
We should take this woman seriously in many ways because she's been able to advance herself and her profile, and we'll see if she'll be able to advance her agenda in Congress.
I suspect she probably will.
Conservatives did this with Bernie Sanders a while ago.
Bernie Sanders is a failure in his private life.
He basically never held a job until he got elected to office and went on the government dole.
He's a looney tune from Vermont, a socialist.
He visited the Soviet Union to vacation.
I think he honeymooned there.
And so we made fun of him.
The man nearly got the Democratic nomination for presidency in 2016.
These things can happen fast.
These extreme political swings can happen very fast.
So we should watch out for her.
Trans Jew Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Who knows?
She might be identifying as a senator soon.
She might be identifying as a presidential candidate if we don't watch it.
So we've got to pay attention.
I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but we've got to talk about the white people retreat.
No white people retreat.
White people band.
This is people of color only.
Yoga retreat in Costa Rica.
This is what the intersectional left has given us.
We've got to talk about Cabot Phillips' great new video.
He went down to the Savannah College of Art and Design.
And all the students want to take Clarence Thomas' name off a building.
Not one of them can explain why that is.
But you've got to subscribe to dailywire.com.
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Vanity Fair did a profile on us the other day, and it said, you know, Ben is a Machiavellian hack.
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Do you hate white people?
Do you not want to be around white people anymore?
Then head on down to the majority white country of Costa Rica.
Here is the no white people allowed vacation from the whites retreat in Costa Rica.
Alexis Bromley is from Nebraska.
She needed a break from white people.
In Omaha, it's very segregated.
It can be very isolating if you're a person of color.
It's hard in Nebraska because it's a red state.
And so you just don't know who you interact with on a daily basis, if they believe that you're lesser, if you're inferior, and how that in turn can affect me.
She says the current political climate has only made these feelings worse.
So she decided to go on a women of color healing retreat in Costa Rica.
Hi, such beautiful smiles.
Thank you guys so much for coming.
My blackness is bold.
My blackness is uninhibited.
My blackness is strength.
My whiteness is beige.
My tanness is oily.
My whiteness is swarthy.
I don't know.
I could go on and on.
I love the argument that she makes.
The woman there, she says, I live in Nebraska, and Nebraska is really segregated and isolating.
So what I decided to do is segregate and isolate myself by going to Costa Rica and being away from all those damned white people.
The retreat obviously bans white people.
Who was it founded by?
I'll give you five seconds.
Describe to me the sort of person who would found this retreat.
Five, four, three, two, one.
If you didn't name a silly-named hipster from Brooklyn as the founder of this retreat, you haven't been watching this show close enough.
This was obviously founded by a silly-named hipster from Brooklyn, now living in Costa Rica.
Her name is Satya X. That's her name, Satya X. And what do they do at this retreat?
They do a lot of yoga, proving Matt Walsh correct, that yoga is just pure paganism, purely a cultish ritual.
But there's a great irony here, because they're leaving America.
And they're going to, which is, you know, how white is America?
It's only about 50% white, 60% white, maybe at most.
They go to Costa Rica, which is 83.4% white and mestizo.
That's the percentage of the population.
Blacks comprise or constitute 7% of the population.
It's 2.4% Indian, 0.2% Asian.
So they go to a very, very, very white place, and they won't allow any white people to be there, and they just focus on how beautiful they are.
they are.
Listen to how condescending that woman was at the beginning of that clip.
You saw she said, look at all these beautiful smiles.
Wow.
Like she's talking to them like they're three-year-olds.
How infantilizing is that?
It's so, I mean, this is the real danger of this racial intersectional ideology is that it's so infantilizing when they say that speech becomes violence, when they say that we need to separate, we need to resegregate the races because people of color can't even bear to be around, we need to resegregate the races because people of color can't Yes, they can.
You can bear it.
It's fine.
Everybody can bear it.
You can bear speech.
We can all bear speech.
We can all be around people who are different from us.
We can all be around people who look different from us.
It's okay.
You will be fine.
You are not an infant.
It's what I think it was Michael Gerson in the Bush administration referred to as the...
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
That's what you're seeing.
You're seeing it from people who are coming out of the most absurd, elitist, white, hipster culture.
Because that's what this is.
This sort of thing, leaving your...
Leaving your job for a little while, going to a tropical place, and doing yoga, and just thinking about yourself all the time, and turning in on yourself, and how special you are, and how wonderful you are.
That is the epitome of white, hipster, left-wing Brooklyn culture.
That's what it is.
So I'm not surprised at all that it was a Brooklyn hipster who founded the whole thing.
It is such an irony, though.
This awful selfishness.
How do you get out of it?
I think the way that we get out of this awful culture of intersectionality is we stop thinking about ourselves so much.
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package indeed.
Stop thinking about yourself.
Stop thinking about your skin color.
Stop thinking about how beautiful you are.
Stop thinking about how special you are.
Stop thinking about how people are mean to you and they're not fair and it's just not fair.
Stop thinking about yourself.
And start thinking about other things.
Start thinking about how can I make my community a better place?
How can I make my culture a little bit better?
How can I make my country better?
What can I do for my family and my friends and my people and my country?
And how can I be a productive member of society?
Think about that.
Think about what you can do.
Not what everyone else can do for you and how you are just by being in the world.
You will be happier.
I promise you.
I promise you will be happier.
When you just sit around and think about yourself all day, you will become despairing, depressed, and miserable.
But if you do something out in the world, you won't be.
I think this has a lot to do with why millennials are so depressed, why they're anxious, why they're miserable, why rates of anxiety and depression and depression and drugs are skyrocketing.
It's because all we're doing is sitting around thinking about ourselves and thinking about our skin and thinking about how beautiful our smile is.
Stop it.
Stop it.
That is the definition of decadence.
This is why decadence and exorbitant luxury can make people miserable.
It's because you're just so focused in on yourself.
The world is a bright, beautiful place with a lot of diversity, with a lot of beautiful people who are black and who are white and who are this color and who have different ideas and who have this thought about religion and sexuality and comedy and who have a different thought and embrace the diversity.
It's a nice thing.
It's this great irony that the people who prattle on about diversity all the time are the ones segregating and isolating themselves.
Embrace the diversity.
Diversity is a wonderful thing.
Speaking of just totally homogenous thinking, Cabot Phillips from Campus Reform went down to the Savannah College of Art and Design because there's a petition to rename a building Because it's named after Clarence Thomas.
Clarence Thomas, a black, originalist Supreme Court Justice.
They don't like this.
They want to take his name off the building.
Cabot Phillips goes down there.
He wants to see how many of them want the name off and how many of them can explain why.
There's a petition on campus to remove the name of Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice, from a building here.
What's your thought on the petition?
I honestly think he should be removed.
We should probably just take his name off the building.
It's not that big of a deal.
I agree that he should get removed.
What's your thought on the petition?
Uh, I agree.
I don't think he represents the student body.
Uh, I would sign it.
Um, I think I'd probably sign the petition.
And is there anything that you would point to as something that he's done that would warrant that?
I don't know.
Um...
Hmm.
Do you mind if I get back to you?
Hmm...
Is there anything that comes to mind that he's done that you would point to as something that you think disqualifies him?
I don't know.
I've done much research on this.
I just saw a Facebook petition about it, and that's kind of the extent of it.
He is a historical figure, though.
So is Hitler.
Okay.
Is there anything that Justice Thomas has done that you would point to and say that's why we shouldn't have him?
I mean, not in particular.
Not in particular, because I can point to a few things that Hitler did as reasons for which we shouldn't name a building after Hitler.
I can point to at least a few things that he did.
Talk about programming.
It is pretty scary to look at this, because all of them uniformly have the same opinion.
Clarence Thomas, bad.
Take Clarence Thomas off building.
Clarence Thomas, no good, mean, mean guy.
Why?
Not a single one of them can say it.
This is that new meme that's going around of the NPC, the non-player character which depicts left-wingers as just bland, totally empty-headed automatons just going along without any will or agency of their own.
Yeah, that's what it is.
That's what we're looking at right now.
Why are they all so sure that Clarence Thomas is a terrible guy?
Well, one, they've been probably taught it in school.
They've been taught that originalism is bad and Clarence Thomas especially is bad.
They've probably been taught that without any explanation of why exactly that is.
But the other, and that person at the end said...
That there had been a petition on Facebook, and probably what happens is somebody sees a petition on Facebook, they see that their friends like the petition, and then they just decide, based on that social proof, that they are going to agree with that position as well, even though they don't know the opinion itself.
There is a lot of mobbing that goes on, which is in part because of social media, and it's in part because of the nature of politics on campus and for millennials.
Really scary stuff.
I mean, whether they rename the building or not, they shouldn't rename the building, but whether they do or not, just to look at that back to back, all of those people dead certain that they should rename the building.
None of them could explain why, and they didn't seem even bothered that they couldn't explain why.
Really, I hope that seeing that would wake some of them up.
To say, hmm, maybe I should examine my own positions.
But what this means is that the right needs to reconsider how we persuade people.
This is why I'm a huge fan of owning the libs.
This is why I advocate it in a detached way, in an academic way.
It is a very good strategy because talking to those people, reasoned arguments are not primarily what they're basing their opinions on.
I love reasoned arguments as much as the next guy.
I love reasoned arguments.
That's what compels me.
But it isn't primarily what is compelling those people.
Clearly not.
They couldn't recite one reasoned argument.
What is compelling them is culture.
As Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream of culture.
You've got to hit them on the culture.
You've got to hit them with the meme.
You've got to hit them with whatever.
The tweet or the...
Or the movie or the TV show or the song or whatever.
You've got to hit him on the culture.
That is what's going to lead down to politics.
It is not going to go the other way.
There are many reasoned arguments for how wonderful Clarence Thomas is.
There are no reasoned arguments for why he should be removed from a building.
Or his name should be removed from a building.
But that part comes later.
You've got to hit them first because this generation of people is not being convinced primarily by the arguments.
Before we go, Pope Francis wants to rewrite the Lord's Prayer.
This is very frustrating.
The Lord's Prayer, the Our Father Prayer, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
They specifically want to rewrite at the end where it says, And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
And Francis suggested that this be rewritten a while ago.
He said it was a bad translation.
He said that the lead us not into temptation is a bad translation because God would never lead us into temptation.
So it must be a wrong translation.
They never make an argument from the original Greek text, which makes it clear that God is the one being referred to as leading into temptation.
But what Pope Francis said then was, quote,"...a father doesn't do that.
He helps you get up right away.
What induces into temptation is Satan." So he wants to rewrite it to say, abandon us not into temptation.
And this is a terrible idea.
The word in question here is, in the Greek, I'm going to butcher it, is parasmos.
Temptation, it can mean temptation, it can mean trial, it can mean testing.
So what is being said is, lead us not to the trial.
Lead us not to the testing.
Lead us not into temptation.
It is referring to God.
We are asking God not to lead us.
This current suggestion says that only Satan can lead us into temptation.
The reason we know that that isn't true is because we find the Lord's Prayer in the Gospel according to St.
Matthew, in Matthew chapter 6.
Two chapters earlier, in chapter 4, Jesus is led by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil in the wilderness.
It's the devil doing the tempting, but it is God the Spirit doing the leading, two chapters before we get the Lord's Prayer.
And the people who want to change this want to change it because they feel uncomfortable with the notion that God can lead us to a test or to a trial or to be tempted.
But it is clear from the Greek, and it is clear from two chapters earlier in Matthew, that that is the case.
It seems a really bad idea to rewrite a prayer known as the Lord's Prayer.
He doesn't like it when we contradict Him.
And the reason that this is gaining traction is because of widespread theological illiteracy and apathy.
But we shouldn't do it.
Even some conservative Catholics and Christians I know said, oh, what's the issue?
This seems to make sense.
God shouldn't lead people into temptation.
Okay, I see why that intuitively makes sense to you.
But that doesn't make sense from the text.
There's a reason why every translation, every major translation of this uses the phrase lead us not into temptation.
We'll see how that is received by the Catholic Church and by Christians, Protestant Christians more broadly as well.
But not a great idea.
We'll have to have some prelates on soon to ask them how this is going to be instituted.
That's all.
Just rewriting the Lord's Prayer.
That's how we'll end today.
A lot more to get to.
We'll do it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia 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.
Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.
Hey everybody, over on the Matt Wall Show today we're talking about the vile, disgusting, completely pointless, unprovoked attack the media has launched against a college athlete for tweets that he wrote when he was 14.
Also we'll talk about transgender pronouns and space aliens and dog worship.
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