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Feb. 13, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:38
Ep. 297 - Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)

President Trump waxes philosophic on his beautiful wall. We analyze the tradition of aesthete conservatives and philistines liberals. Then, Howard Schultz calls the Green New Deal immoral, Cory Booker says poor people shouldn’t eat meat, and we ask: do animals have feelings? Do white teenage boys? Date: 02-13-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump waxes philosophic on his big, beautiful wall.
We will analyze the long tradition of esthete conservatives and Philistine liberals.
Then, independent Democrat presidential candidate Howard Schultz calls the Green New Deal immoral.
Cory Booker says poor people shouldn't eat meat.
And we ask, do animals have feelings?
Do white teenage boys?
We will ask the important questions.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
If you hadn't seen it, If you hadn't seen it, the cover of Esquire is causing a lot of mayhem and chaos because it features a white teenage boy in middle America.
People are outraged.
The usual suspects are all feigning indignation.
People want him off the cover.
They think it's awful to have a teenage boy on the cover.
This gets to a central bias, a central...
Condemnation of the left.
We'll get to it by the end.
Once we talk about whether animals have feelings, we can figure out if white teen boys do too.
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Before we get to whether teenage boys have feelings or not, teenage white boys, let's talk about an overgrown teenage white boy, President Donald Trump, who remains on the war path.
We talked about this yesterday.
He's having a very good start to his week.
He's had a very good previous week.
And he just keeps on doing it, keeps on winning.
And there is even more good news now.
So we talked about...
Good potential news from his cabinet meeting.
We'll go through that cabinet meeting today.
We talked about the rally down in El Paso.
We talked about how he's winning in public opinion.
But now he's even got some more trolling.
If you looked at his Twitter account this morning, he was referring to the Senate...
An investigation into his improprieties with Russia.
And he tweeted out not a Daily Wire clip, not a Fox News clip.
He tweeted out an MSNBC clip to celebrate this news.
NBC News exclusive reporting on the Senate Intelligence Committee, their investigation into Russian election interference and what they have and have not uncovered.
NBC's Ken Delaney has just jumped in front of a camera to join me with his new reporting.
So Ken, what are you hearing?
What are you learning?
Hallie, after two years and interviewing more than 200 witnesses, the Senate Intelligence Committee has not uncovered any direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
That's according to sources on both the Republican and the Democratic side of the aisle, Hallie.
And careful viewers and readers will note that Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee who leads this probe, Essentially said that in an interview with another network last week, but what I've been doing since then is checking with my sources on the Democratic side to understand the full context of his remarks, because that was essentially a partisan comment from one side.
But this is a bipartisan investigation, and what I found is that the Democrats don't dispute that.
Oh my, so President Trump included that entire clip from MSNBC because the schadenfreude is so much better when your opponents are saying that.
What they're saying is the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating Trump's links to Russia, Russian interference, whatever.
They came up short.
And now you could say, well, the Senate is run by Republicans, and so it's no surprise that they came up short.
But what they're saying on MSNBC, to their credit, they're at least admitting it, is that they spoke to sources on both sides of the aisle on that committee.
The Republicans said the investigation turned up nothing.
The Democrats said the investigation turned up nothing.
Now, we predicted that this would happen weeks and weeks and months and months ago, of course, but we also saw that this was happening...
In particular, right now, last week, when Adam Schiff, that Democrat congressman who's running all the investigations, when he started shifting his focus away from Russia onto Donald Trump's financial interests, you realized they were coming up with nothing on Russia.
Russia was the story.
If they could have said, ah, Donald Trump visited Russia.
He ate borscht ten years ago.
If they could have linked him, they would have stuck on that story.
But they can't.
They came up with nothing.
And so now they're saying, well...
If Vladimir Putin is not buying off Donald Trump, we want to make sure that nobody else is either.
So we're going to look into all of his financial records since forever, and then we're going to make sure nothing is improper there.
Now the reason for this, of course, is that Donald Trump is a very wealthy man.
He has about a zillion businesses.
Some of them succeeded, some of them went under.
Any guy who's...
Worked for a long time in business is going to have very complex financials and they're hoping to look in and find something untoward.
Especially if you worked in real estate development in New York, you probably dealt with some shady characters.
So now they're just trying to rummage through Trump's trash and find anything that might be scintillating for gossipers, anything that might be scintillating to try to bring him down.
But on Russia, what have they got thus far?
Nothing.
Now, we can wait for the Mueller report.
Maybe Bob Mueller found something that nobody else was able to find.
Maybe he found the smoking gun of Donald Trump colluding with Boris and Natasha.
But right now, as we have said since the beginning, since 2016, it's just not looking like it.
So, the substantive question.
President Trump is obviously winning on this one issue that has dogged him.
You can tell he's sort of let it get to him because he'll just tweet out, no collusion!
Crazy investigations.
He mentioned it in the State of the Union.
Now on the substantive question.
Will President Trump take a deal on the wall?
Or will he shut down the government?
So he shut down the government and he said, we need to get 5.7, I believe, billion dollars for wall funding.
Now, 5.7 billion dollars is not nearly enough to build the wall.
It's only enough to build a couple hundred miles of new wall.
Then the government was shut down, longest shutdown ever.
Then the government reopens and he says, I'm going to open it for three weeks.
But if we don't get to the negotiating table, if you don't give me money for the wall, then I'm going to shut the government down again.
So will he shut it down?
I don't think so.
I don't think he's going to.
I don't know how important it is that he does, actually.
It depends on how else he can get the money.
I think he likes his high approval rating.
I think he likes that right now he is seriously winning.
There's a lot of momentum in the public opinion sphere for him.
So I don't think that he wants to kill that approval rating and halt that momentum by shutting down the government again.
Also, what would he be shutting it down for?
He needs to build the wall.
If he can't do it, he's toast in 2020.
But if he can do it another way, he should.
So the deal on the table that has been struck by legislators that they're now bringing to Donald Trump asking his opinion on takes the amount of requested money down from $5 billion all the way down to $1.375 billion for a wall.
That is a fraction of what they offered him for the wall.
Obviously a lot less than he asked for.
And they won't be able to build much wall for this.
What are they going to be able to build?
50 miles maybe of wall?
So why would Donald Trump take the deal?
There's one really big reason why he would take the deal.
And the reason is this.
If he gets even $1.4 billion or $1.375 billion for the wall, he can come back and destroy the Democrats' fundamental argument, which is that walls are immoral, which is that walls don't work.
That's been their argument now since the beginning.
Walls are immoral, ineffective, and they cost too much money.
And what President Trump can say, if he takes any amount of money, if they give him 50 bucks out of their pockets, he can say, well, if walls are immoral, then you all just committed an immorality.
If walls are ineffective, then you all just gave me money for nothing.
And if walls are too expensive, then you all just wasted the people's money, even if it's only some of the people's money, even if it's only a tiny fraction of it.
So I think there actually is an argument to take a deal, even if the deal isn't going to build a whole lot of wall.
Because then what is their argument?
When he comes back and says, we need more money for more wall, are they going to say, it's immoral!
He said, well, you all did it already.
I mean, this argument was so effective for Republicans when they pointed to Chuck Schumer and said, hey, Chuck Schumer, in 2006, you paid for the wall.
Now, it never got built, or in a lot of places it wasn't built, but you paid for it.
So what's changed now?
Now some Democrats in the House and the Senate were not susceptible to this attack because they weren't there in 2006.
They're relative newcomers.
But now if he gets all of them on the record as paying for this wall, what argument do they have?
I'm not sure.
The thing that needs to be addressed, of course, is how does he build the rest of the wall?
If he just builds 50 miles of wall, he's toast in 2020.
His supporters will abandon him.
If he can't build more than 50 miles of wall, What are we doing?
What are we even doing here?
It's his signature central campaign promise.
So President Trump, all of this swirling around in his head, he finally addressed the question over whether he would accept the deal or not at a cabinet meeting.
We're getting a beautiful looking structure.
That's also less expensive to build and works much better.
That's a good combination of events because it was crazy what they were putting up.
In fact, I happen to think that the walls that they were building were so unattractive and so ugly that walls got bad names, okay, if that means anything.
But they were so ugly with rusted steel and big ugly plates on top that were all tin-canned.
It's called tin-canned where they're wavy because the heat makes them...
Expand and contract and they tin can.
I say, why didn't you paint the steel?
Well, sir, we save money by not painting it.
I said, yeah, but it's going to rust.
You have to paint.
I've never seen, I've ordered a lot of steel.
I've never seen in my whole life steel come to me that was unpainted.
So he goes on like this for a little bit.
You'll notice the way he's talking about the wall, he's not talking about it in utilitarian terms.
He's not talking about it even as a matter of cost.
He's talking about it in strictly aesthetic terms.
And here, President Trump comes from a long conservative tradition.
This actually shows us a significant difference between the right and the left.
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So President Trump is there at the cabinet meeting talking about the wall.
And the way he's talking about it is in aesthetic terms.
He said the walls that they built before, the fences they built before, were so ugly, they gave walls themselves a bad name.
He said up at the top, because the steel was poor quality and it wasn't painted, it would start to tin can.
It would get waves throughout it.
It would start to rust.
And President Trump was outraged that it would start to rust.
Good steel.
You shouldn't rust.
You should be able to paint it.
That way it won't rust.
I love that he's speaking in these terms.
These aesthetic terms, these graphic terms, show a big difference with the left.
The left tends to be strictly utilitarian.
And conservatives are not.
I think in the popular culture we get this backwards.
We think of conservatives as the sort of stodgy old man reading the Wall Street Journal just counting the dollars in his bank account.
And liberals, rather, you know, they're the artistic ones, man.
They've got such cool artistic ideas.
In reality, it's the reverse.
Because the left has very little imagination.
The left has its ideology, it's got its science of politics, its science of history, and it's trudging along joylessly toward progressive utopia.
But on the conservative side, conservatives have a more romantic view of the world, a more immense...
We have a complex, intricate view of the world.
We have a greater appreciation of mystery.
We look at the world with greater awe and wonder.
It's no coincidence that the Big Mac Daddy of conservative thought, the godfather of conservative thought, Edmund Burke, was a proto-romantic.
He inspired the romantics.
Our main conservative modern founder, Edmund Burke, Before he wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France, he was an aesthetic philosopher.
He wrote an inquiry into our ideas on the sublime and the beautiful.
President Trump is going to write the revised and expanded edition, I think.
He's going to write a sequel to that.
These terms, obviously President Trump has used these a lot.
On the campaign trail, one thing that really set him apart from the other candidates is the other candidates will all be speaking in really dry policy terms.
And President Trump would paint a picture.
He would paint a picture of John Kasich eating in a disgusting manner.
Oh, you ever see the way that guy eats?
It's disgusting.
He just stuffs his face.
He's hovering over the plate.
It's disgusting.
And then you'd have this image in your head.
You'd have an image of low-energy Jeb.
What does low energy evoke?
Maybe like a little atom with the electrons or dead or just kind of a guy slumped sort of like this.
Little Marco.
He's always sweating.
He's always thirsty.
It gives you this image of a nervous guy, a guy reaching for water, sweat pouring down his face.
He was always painting pictures and it created images that really stuck.
So throughout that entire campaign, when he gave you a nickname, when he gave you a description, it would really stick.
This is a wonderful tool of conservatives and of the right, and we should use it all the time.
We should use our vivid imagery, our appreciation of a world that is more complex than some stupid little manifesto, you know, than here's the whole world in five bullet points, according to Karl Marx.
The conservative view is so much richer than that.
We should use it.
I mean, this is part of what makes leftism so inhuman.
Leftism treats human beings like material objects.
When our material needs are satisfied, everything is great.
So when Barack Obama was talking about jihad in the Middle East, he said, oh, the reason that these guys are committing jihad is not because they're motivated by big ideas.
It's not because they have a perverse view of God and the divine and the transcendent and the purpose of their lives.
No, no.
It's because they don't have jobs.
It's because they can't afford to buy iPods.
You know, if these guys in jihadi land, if they could just buy iPods and watch TV, oh, then they'd be totally fine.
We're just automatons.
We're just material, fleshy, deterministic machines.
Once you plug us full of material, then we don't have any thoughts anymore.
This is the idea of the left.
That's unhuman.
They don't realize that human beings are not primarily material creatures.
We're primarily spiritual and artistic creatures.
G.K. Chesterton wrote about this.
With the earliest men, when you think about the caveman, what image comes into your mind?
This sort of semi-conscious, big eyebrows, not very smart guy who's dragging a club in one arm and his wife in the other.
And he's dragging them around and he's a brute and he's barely, he's not capable of reason and he's barely recognizable to us.
Because that is the leftist view of We don't know that the caveman carried a club around.
We don't know that the caveman dragged his wife by her hair.
We don't know anything about the caveman other than this, that he was an artist.
Chesterton points this out.
The only thing we actually know about cavemen is that they painted drawings on cave walls.
Little animals in pigments.
That's what they did.
Actually, the only firm thing we can say about our hominid cave ancestors is that they had an artistic sensibility.
They wanted to reproduce their vision of the world in art.
And they had an abstract enough reason and a sophisticated enough consciousness that they were able to do that.
They were able to see an animal in the field, go into a cave, and by torchlight or whatever, paint the little animal in the cave.
They had a sophisticated enough artistic sense that they could create the pigment in which to paint the animal.
That is a sophisticated creature.
That is a creature so sophisticated, he almost looks like you and me.
Turns out that our ancestors may have had a lot in common with us.
It turns out maybe the essence of humanity.
Is aesthetic.
And conservatives really get this.
And even President Trump.
I mean, you know, our image of President Trump is that he's walking around the field with a club in one arm and his wife in the other arm dragging her by the hair.
But in reality, when you actually listen to this guy talk, especially when he talks about building, especially when he talks about his career, he speaks in aesthetic terms.
So that's how he's viewing the wall primarily.
I think it's a great way to view it.
What about the deal itself?
Are you happy at first glance?
I just got to see it.
The answer is no.
I'm not.
I'm not happy.
But am I happy with where we're going?
I'm thrilled.
Because we're supplementing things and moving things around and we're doing things that are fantastic and taking from far less...
Really from far less important areas.
And the bottom line is we're building a lot of wall.
Right now we're building a lot of wall.
And you think it's easy?
We're building in the face of tremendous obstruction and tremendous opposition.
Look at the comparison, just how when he's talking about the wall itself to when he's talking about how he's going to fund the wall, he starts to say at the letter, yeah, well, we're taking a lot of money from different areas, and frankly, everybody, and it's going from an area, it'll be in another area, obstruction.
He clearly cares a lot less about that.
I think he just wants to get the thing built.
And so, should he take the deal or not?
Well, if he can take the deal and then tie it around the Democrats next, that's fine.
If and only if he can take the money from elsewhere.
Senator Ted Cruz has a great idea of where to get that money, which is that we've finally got El Chapo.
We're putting him into an American prison, so he's not going to break out this time.
He's not going to break out like he did in Mexico.
And we seized $14 billion from him.
President Trump only asked for $5 billion for the wall.
How about we take all that $14 billion through asset forfeiture?
And then, if you did that, you would not only be able to build the wall, you would make Mexico pay for it.
You'd be able to make Mexico pay for it without Mexico actually paying for it.
So without making the Mexican taxpayers pay for it or the Mexican government, you take the worst Mexican of all time and you just steal all his money.
Which he's given up now.
I mean, he's a prisoner.
He's not getting that money back.
And so you take that money, you make Mexico pay for it.
And specifically, one of the main reasons we need this wall is because drugs keep pouring over the border.
This guy's responsible for a lot of that.
Take his money and make him build the wall.
You broke it, you buy it.
It would be terrific if we can do it.
Whether the asset forfeiture laws are such that that's even possible is up in the air.
Conservatives have been promoting this idea for a long time.
It's not just Ted Cruz or Donald Trump who can do it.
Maybe it gets challenged in court.
Maybe it's tied up in court for a long time.
It would be a great way to start doing it, though.
And in this very whimsical way, you could accomplish every single one of the campaign promises in a way that certainly not even President Trump could have expected.
But President Trump is not the only person who's upset with Democrats these days for obstruction or radicalism.
Democrat Howard Schultz is also upset with the Democrats.
And here is why, in a CNN town hall, he's asked this question.
As a lifelong Houstonian, I've seen the damages that hurricanes have caused to my city, and I watched as Harvey continued in a devastating way that damage.
So in the face of a warming climate that leads to more powerful storms, how much of a priority would climate change be to your administration, and what are some plans you have to tackle that issue?
Before we get to his answer, I would like to point this out.
This is the trick that the left does all the time.
He says, as a native Houstonian, I have seen the damage that global warming has done to my community.
I've seen what these storms that are caused by global warming, I've seen what they do, and I've seen global warming up close because of specific weather events, global warming.
Is weather the climate or is weather not the climate?
Because when Amy Klobuchar gets covered in snow and we mock her for saying global warming is happening, they say, weather is not climate.
And then when this kid gets up there and says, there was a big storm that affected Houston, therefore that is global warming, All of the left applauds and says, yes, that is.
That specific weather event is the climate.
But only that one.
Because it confirms our biases.
Not the other specific weather events.
That's not climate.
What?
You'd have to be an idiot to think that those specific weather events are climate.
Which is it?
It cannot be both.
I know they want it to be.
It's very convenient when it's both.
Is the premise here, by the way, that before global warming there was no such thing as hurricanes?
The first ever hurricane happened in 1997.
It was the first ever hurricane ever recorded by human beings.
We didn't even know.
We thought the gods were coming down.
They were so angry with us because of all the rain.
No, the first in 1997, right when global warming started, that was the first hurricane.
No, of course, you have to pick one or the other.
But for some reason, conservatives let the left get away with this.
They say, well, the extreme storms...
What about the extreme blizzard up in Minnesota?
Is that global warming?
You cannot have both ways.
So Howard Schultz answers the question.
When I read the Green New Deal and I try and understand what they're suggesting, I don't understand how you're going to give a job for everybody, how you're going to give free college to everybody, how you're going to create clean energy throughout the country in every building of the land.
And then tally this thing up with $32 trillion on Medicare for All.
That's about $40 trillion plus.
We are sitting, ladies and gentlemen, with $22 trillion of debt.
On the balance sheet of America.
So, once again, not that I'm a business person or I'm an economist, and maybe an economist would disagree with me, but I think it's immoral to suggest that we can tally up 20, 30, 40, 50 trillion dollars of debt to solve a problem that could be solved in a different way.
Now, of course he's right about this.
The question is, is this going to help him in his strategy to run as an independent Democrat for president, or is this going to hurt him?
I think it helps him.
His whole strategy is that he has to split the Democrats, he's got to split the reasonable Democrats away from the insane, radical, intersectional leftists, and then he's got to siphon some votes off of Donald Trump, and then he becomes president.
Now, is this a likely strategy?
Is he likely to become president?
No.
But anything could happen.
Look, never say never when it comes to Donald Trump, as they say.
So I suppose there's a world in which it does happen, plus events change everything.
So if Donald Trump goes spiraling down for some reason, he actually has a pretty good chance of doing it.
I don't think that Howard Schultz is running an intentionally futile campaign.
I don't think he's running just to show the strength of possible third parties.
I don't think that at all.
I think Howard Schultz is running to win.
He knows that the odds are stacked against him, but he's going to put himself in a place where, if something goes wrong, he could theoretically become president.
Now, there is an appetite out there for less crazy Democrats.
There genuinely is.
What Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal people try to insist is that The American people broadly love the Green New Deal.
That's what they said.
They said over 80% of Democrats and over 60% of Republicans support the Green New Deal.
And what those statistics are based on is a survey from Yale's Center for Climate Change Communication, and it's a totally bogus survey which polled people who did not know what the Green New Deal is, have never heard of the Green New Deal, and when it asked them about it, basically just said, hey, the Green New Deal is really great, and it's going to be really, really great, and its supporters say it's really, really great.
Do you support it?
And then they were shocked to find out that most people supported that really great thing.
But when people actually learn about what the Green New Deal is, 88% of American energy destroyed, costs $40 trillion that they're going to pay for by printing money out of thin air right out of the Federal Reserve, that it's going to outlaw automobiles, it's going to outlaw planes, it's going to outlaw your house, it's going to take away your doctor and your medical care, it's going to take away unemployment insurance, it's going to force people onto a backstop government job.
When people find out about that, The popularity of the Green New Deal plummets to nothing.
So there is certainly an appetite out there for a less crazy Democrat.
Howard Schultz is filling that.
He's not a Republican.
Some people are trying to present him as this conservative guy.
He's not at all.
He really is a lifelong Democrat.
But there's an appetite out there for less insane Democrats.
Same thing on abortion.
There's a new survey out today from YouGov.
It shows that two-thirds of people who identify as pro-choice in favor of abortion oppose third trimester abortion.
So two-thirds of people who think that they support abortion actually are pro-choice Think that after, whatever, 24, 26 weeks, abortion should be illegal.
To say nothing of Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia's idea, that abortion should be legal after birth.
We should be able to kill babies once they've been born.
So there's a real appetite out there.
Howard Schultz is a tough dude.
He's not a squish.
He is running to win.
He sees an opening for himself.
I think it'll probably help Republicans broadly, but who knows?
And if he is able to bring the Democrats back to some modicum of sanity, that would be a great service to the nation.
But a guy who is a squish is Cory Booker.
Cory Booker is telling everybody not to eat meat, especially poor people.
We will get to the Democrats all trying to outwoke one another.
Then we will ask, do animals have feelings?
Then we will ask...
Do white teenage boys have feelings?
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And by the way, if Howard Schultz does run hard for president through the general, and if he spoils the election for Democrats, and if because of him Donald Trump gets re-elected, we're going to put out the vintage Leftist Tears Pike Place Roast.
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I think it tastes so, so sweet.
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We'll be right back.
Cory Booker is a vegan today, I guess.
Of course he is.
Did anyone really think otherwise?
All of these Democrat candidates are trying to outwoke one another, other than Howard Schultz, who basically is playing a different game.
He says, I'm not going to outwoke all you idiots.
I'm going to run on my own ticket, and I'm going to beat all of you because I have a lot of money.
So, you've got Kamala Harris yesterday talking about how she loves smoking pot and listening to Snoop Dogg, even though Snoop Dogg didn't come out with his debut album until seven years after Kamala Harris said that she was smoking pot.
Then you've got Beto O'Rourke writing his little diary entries like a teenage girl.
You've got Elizabeth Warren now addressing an Indian group.
She's doing it again.
She appeared at another Indian group and talked about how important it is to support Indians.
This is her white whale.
She cannot give this up.
I think maybe for a couple reasons.
One, she lied about it for so long that it's really hard for her to stop lying about being Native American.
And two...
Because of her own sense of virtue.
Either how she wants to appear virtuous to her voters, or even her own sense of virtue to herself.
Because what she has done is lie about her race for decades to her professional advantage, and actually to the disadvantage of real Native Americans.
And now, in her mind and in the mind of voters, she hopes...
She's supposed to be a really good, virtuous person.
She's so much better than mean, bad guys like Donald Trump.
Those are bad people, but she's a good person.
Except it turns out she's not a good person.
She's a race fraud who disadvantaged Native Americans to get ahead in her career.
Not a good person.
At least as bad a person as the rest of us.
She's not Saint Elizabeth.
She's not holier than thou.
She's a race fraud.
And so she can't get over it.
She keeps going back.
She said, oh, let me release DNA results.
See, I'm right.
I'm a good person.
I'm not a liar and a race fraud.
I'm a good person.
Let me apologize to the Cherokee Nation.
See, I'm a good belief that I'm a good person.
She can't outwoke this.
This is going to dog her.
If she'd had an answer on this, she would have come up with one already.
But she hasn't.
It's dogged her for a long time.
She made her TP. She can lie in her TP. And now, it looks like it's killed her presidential campaign.
She's going to keep going back to it.
It's going to keep being funny.
And now, to outwoke them all, Cory Booker is focusing on being vegan.
The thing you'll notice about all of this...
Smoke and pot.
Listening to Snoop Dogg.
Writing little diary entries about your feelings.
Trying on new identities.
Trying on racial minority identities that you don't even really have, but you just want to kind of craft that identity.
Being vegan.
What do all these things have in common?
These are all phases that teenagers go through.
Teenagers go through all of these phases.
Some more than others.
It's because Democrats, these candidates, don't have a serious sense of purpose.
They don't have a serious sense of maturity.
They don't have a serious sense of identity.
So they just keep cycling through these phases like teenagers.
They're behaving in a shallow, sophomoric way.
They just never got to the next stage of mental and spiritual development.
And so they just keep trying on these different phases, these little fads.
Here is Cory Booker.
Cory Booker whining, as he usually does, defending veganism against his critics.
It's just disheartening to hear somebody in this day and age, in the United States of America, say, basically, implicate that gay men are not men.
That they're not guys.
That was the wrong clip.
Maybe.
Maybe that was the wrong clip.
That was Cory Booker talking about another rumor, and actually, really, the woke prize of them all.
There have been public rumors for a long time that Cory Booker is gay, and he's always denied it.
Then he came out with this bombshell story last week.
Cory Booker has a girlfriend.
You know, she's living up in Canada.
None of us have ever seen her.
But yeah, he has got a girlfriend.
I don't know.
Who cares?
I don't really care if Cory Booker is gay or not.
But that would be the woke prize.
That would be the, if a candidate came out as openly gay during the primary, could you ever outwoke that?
The only way to outwoke that would be to come out as transgender or something, which I guess any of them could do at any given time.
But this is what Cory Booker is doing.
He's leaning in all this way.
Whenever he's asked the question about being gay, he says, well, so what if I am?
Maybe I am gay.
I'm not gay, but what if I am?
And he's pushing this line.
I don't know whether Cory Booker is gay or not.
Frankly, I don't know if Cory Booker is vegan or not.
But they're just trying to check all of the behavioral boxes...
What they view as the ideal behavioral boxes of the left, have a non-traditional diet, have a non-traditional sexuality, smoke non-traditional drugs, have a non-traditional ethnicity, even if you have to make one up out of whole cloth like Liz Warren.
That is what they're all aiming for.
And you'll notice what none of this has anything to do with is public policy.
None of this has anything to do with actually doing the job of president, or even their own experience in life.
They're just talking about little fads that teenagers do.
The latest one now being veganism.
This does raise a real question, which is, what is the morality of veganism?
Do animals have feelings?
As was recently asked in an article, I think in The Atlantic, are animals morally significant?
This article was really good.
I encourage people to read it.
Every so often, You know, Kate Flanagan always publishes good stuff in The Atlantic, and she's the one person who does.
And then all the other stuff in The Atlantic is trash.
I barely read it anymore, except every so often they publish a good piece.
So this one they ask, do animals have feelings?
And they talk about...
The Jains in India and this group of people who has a religious devotion to animals and how they understood long before the West did, long before those idiot Westerners, these Eastern spiritual people, realized that animals are really super conscious and they suffer all the time and they're just as complex as humans and we can never even look at them the wrong way.
Here is the sort of fake science that they use throughout this article.
In the article they say, quote, In one experiment, honeybees were attracted to a boat at the center of a lake, which scientists stocked with sugar water.
When the bees flew back to the hive, they communicated the boat's location with waggle dances.
The hive's other bees would usually set out immediately for a newly revealed nectar load.
But in this case, they stayed put, as though they'd consulted a mental map and dismissed the possibility of flowers in the middle of a lake.
Other scientists were not able to replicate this result, but different experiments suggest that bees are capable of consulting a mental map in this way.
What?
Because all they want, this is the new move that everyone wants to do, they want to prove that animals are just as conscious as we are.
They anthropomorphize animals because they can't stand the idea that man has dominion over the land and the sea.
They can't stand the idea that man is superior to the other animals.
No, no.
We're all just the same thing.
We're basically just slightly more advanced honeybees.
But even the way that they say it, look at their imagination.
The imagination of these scientists, and especially this writer.
The honeybees were communicating in this really sophisticated way.
This location far, far away on a lake in the middle of a boat.
And the other honeybees, they were all going to go over there to get the sugar water.
They didn't, of course, but that's just because, why?
Because they had thought about it, they were thinking about it really complexly, but then they didn't do it, because they rejected it.
They had some meetings, and they held a couple elections probably, and I don't know, they built up huge civilization, and then they just didn't do it.
And scientists weren't able to replicate any of the stuff we're saying, but they're Really, really, really smart, you guys.
This is the product of, I think, an idolatry of scientific materialism.
This is a product of an idolatry of processes of natural evolution.
People who want to erase the distinction between man and beast, but human beings have intellect and will.
We are different.
We are categorically different from animals.
This is not popular according to modern orthodoxy, but it remains true and attempts to To present some other idea or to upend that, always end up in silly mental gymnastics and unscientific conclusions such as this.
But it says a lot about our society, our modern materialist secular society, that we are so desperate to make ourselves the same as animals.
We want to level ourselves down in this egalitarianism, not just of the species, but of all the species.
We want to level ourselves down.
We want to anthropomorphize and exalt and raise up animals.
This is pagan, and there is a reason that they're comparing this to the Janes or ancient Indian religions.
This is paganism, and we have a new paganism on our hands because we are rejecting the natural order and all of the philosophical and theological and scientific fruits of our civilization.
So, I don't think animals have feelings.
Do white men have feelings?
There's a wonderful piece in Esquire called The Life of an American Boy at 17.
This is so awful.
This piece talks about a white teenage boy in middle America.
He's on the cover of Esquire.
How dare they!
How dare you put a white...
White teenage boys are the worst.
White teenage boys are the only group in America that the culture permits and actually encourages us to hate and condemn.
You remember with those Covington boys who were waiting for their school bus in D.C. Everyone jumped on them, tried to turn them into awful racial bigots, whatever.
Then it turned out it was exactly the opposite.
And the senior...
Culture writer at BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Peterson, said, Well, you can understand why that face caused a visceral reaction in so many.
He's a young white guy, and young white guys are the worst.
There was that piece in the Yale Daily News about how young white guys with brown hair are evil and we should ruin their lives.
That's the culture that we live in now.
Actually, the reaction that this piece has prompted...
is evidence that the piece is urgent and timely.
The big line now they say is, how dare you run that cover during Black History Month?
You can only do black things during Black History Month.
You can't do any non-black things during Black History Month.
You have to wait until White Middle Class Teenage Boy Month to run the cover of that kid on Esquire.
I don't know when White Middle Class Teenage Boy Month is.
It's not as though Esquire doesn't put black men on the cover of their magazine.
They do it all the time.
In just the last year or two, they've put on Idris Elba, Pharrell, Chadwick Boseman, Donald Glover.
You don't only limit black men to one month.
You know, you can have black men in any month of the year.
It's okay.
They're not outlawed during all the other 11 months.
This is how the piece begins.
It says, Other than that, he doesn't think there are too many reasons it would be better to be a guy than a girl, unless you're from the Middle East or maybe the inner city.
This is a profile of the way that a 17-year-old boy in America is thinking.
So it has all of these things.
He seems like a perfectly moderate kid, by the way.
It's not like he's some guy wearing a Trump hat every single place he goes.
He's saying being a mom is the hardest job in the world.
The reason he wants to be a guy is because that's who he is.
He can't really imagine being a girl.
But in the abstract, he doesn't think it would be terrible to be a girl unless you're not living in Western civilization where it actually is pretty terrible to be a girl.
The editor of the magazine sent out a letter explaining why he put this piece, because he knew that there would be pushback.
The piece that he wrote in that letter is called, Why Your Ideological Echo Chamber Isn't Just Bad for You, It's Also Bad for Your Kids.
And it is.
This is really bad.
We live in a very confusing culture where we're told to judge people only on their character, not on the color of their skin or superficial physical characteristics.
We're also told that white teenage boys are the worst people ever, the embodiment of evil, other than maybe grown straight white men who think that they're men.
That's the top of the intersectional pyramid.
But they're just awful people.
But don't judge anyone on their skin or on their sex.
We're told that men and women are so exactly the same that there is no difference whatsoever.
Men can be women.
Women can be men.
Sex barely exists.
And then we're also told if you treat women In a certain way, if you don't treat men and women exactly the same, you can never hit a woman.
Now, of course, we all know you can never hit a woman.
You can't hit a woman because men and women are different.
But if men and women are exactly the same, why can't you hit a woman?
If there's no physical or spiritual difference whatsoever.
We're told a lot of confusing messages.
We're told that everyone is entitled to his opinion.
Think outside the box.
Diversity.
Tolerance.
And then, as this article shows, if you're a white teenage boy who holds an opinion, you're told, shut up.
You have privilege.
You're not entitled to have an opinion.
Shut your mouth.
Check your privilege.
And stop talking.
These are very confusing messages, a very confusing time, a very confusing leftist culture that gave it to us.
The Esquire piece beautifully and bravely analyzes that.
I encourage you all to read it.
It's a very long piece.
And you should read it and post about it, too, because it drives the left.
Crazy.
Kudos to Esquire.
Esquire is not exactly a conservative magazine, but they're at least dealing honestly with this question.
So my hat goes off to them.
I tip my MAGA hat to them.
Okay, that's our show.
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This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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