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Feb. 20, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
57:48
The Conversation Ep. 18: Michael Knowles
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That's it.
We're live with our newest episode of The Conversation.
I am your host, Elisha Kraus, and with me is the ex-cribble?
Excellent.
I don't know about that.
Michael Knowles will be taking your questions live for an entire hour.
Alright, so please remember, you remember this, right?
We've been doing this for like 18 months now.
We've done this for a little bit, but remind me of the rules.
What happens?
So everyone is perfectly clear, our conversation is streaming for everyone to watch, but only subscribers get to ask the questions.
Be sure to click the link in our video description if you want to ask a question or become a Daily Wire subscriber.
And if you become a Daily Wire subscriber for the whole year, you get that amazing Leftist Tears Tumblr that Michael just sipped some delicious LA Leftist Tears from.
There's been a lot of LA leftist tears lately.
We've had a ton of rain.
Right, that's true.
I think it's all the leftist tears from everything that's been happening in politics recently.
That high-speed rail just got shrunk to about three feet somewhere in Bakersfield.
I know, Gavin Newsom did that.
He induced his own leftist tears.
I know, this is what happens.
It's incredible.
They're masochistic.
And don't worry, folks.
Next month's episode of The Conversation will be much, much better.
And we have some exciting things in store because it will be with our very own Ben Shapiro.
And there's going to be some really cool audience interaction on that episode of The Conversation that we haven't done before.
But I can't reveal any more secrets or otherwise I could get...
I don't even know about this.
What's going to happen?
I can't say anything.
Okay.
My lips are sealed.
Sad.
Sad.
So, you know who's sad?
You've made some people very sad and mad this week.
I saw that.
And Tifa plans on showing up tomorrow night, or Thursday night.
You'll be at Notre Dame.
I'm going to be at Notre Dame on Thursday.
It's because at Notre Dame, the president of that university has decided to cover up murals of Christopher Columbus.
Because Christopher, he is one of the greatest men in all of history.
And the left has just decided that Columbus is the devil incarnate.
Mostly because they're moral idiots and historically ignorant.
So I'm going to be explaining why Christopher Columbus is one of the greatest men in all of history.
And apparently Antifa is upset about that.
So a bunch of losers in black masks have decided they're going to come yell at me.
But they're going to get learned once they listen to my speech.
Do you think they'll actually listen?
Do you think they'll come in to the lecture hall and hear you out?
I don't know if they're capable of listening.
Because those stupid masks, I think, cover up their ears too much.
They've got some like cotton in your ears.
It's cold in India.
It's very chilly, so we'll see what happens.
I think a number of them have already, they've RSVP'd to the Antifa group.
I don't think they've RSVP'd to come listen to my lecture, but they should because they would probably learn a thing or two.
And I think the title of the lecture is Columbus, Hero Not Heathen?
That's right.
That was the most politically correct one that I could come up with.
There were a few others that got rejected in the drafting folder.
And it's going to be streamed on all of our Daily Wire and over by our buddies at YAF who are sponsoring it.
Yeah, it's going to be part of the AFT tour.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
And people are going to learn a thing or two.
They're going to unlearn a lot of leftist, anti-historical nonsense that they think they know about Columbus, and they're going to learn what a wonderful man he was.
Alright, we've got our first question.
This one comes from Jonathan.
He says, Hi Michael, what status do you think that illegal aliens brought to the U.S. as minors should have or have available to them?
Well, the first question is not what status they should have.
The question is what status do they have.
And the status is not legal.
They're not American citizens.
They are foreign nationals who were brought to this country illegally.
So they are foreign nationals and they should be dealt with as foreign nationals.
And their criminal parents certainly should be dealt with as foreign nationals.
Now, the question is, if you were to come up with some deal as to building the wall, closing the border, dumping a lot of money into border security, deporting a lot of other people who shouldn't be here, who are here illegally and should not be here, if as part of a deal on that you were to say that part of if as part of a deal on that you were to say that part of the compromise is that we would have to give some plausible legal status to people who were brought here under the age of 18, I might be willing to consider that, but without building the wall, without deporting a ton of other people, without
but without building the wall, without deporting a ton of other I'm not even remotely interested in hearing any arguments about giving amnesty to the so-called dreamers, many of whom are like 40 years old at this point.
And by the way, they try to present this group of people As they're all going to MIT, they're all joining the military, they're all serving their country.
If they are, can we replace them with all the Americans who aren't?
Yeah, right.
That's great.
I mean, in that regard, I'm very happy to do that.
But the studies show that simply is not the case.
They have lower educational attainment, so they have higher access to welfare services.
So, to have a serious conversation about that, you first need to close the border.
Because, as has been shown by Fusion, by Amnesty International, reported by the Huffington Post.
All conservative outlets, by the way.
All of those conservative institutions.
Between 60 and 80% of the illegal aliens who are women and girls that cross this border illegally are raped and sexually assaulted on the journey.
That is just one example of one of the horrific...
And by giving amnesty to millions of so-called dreamers, you create a huge, perverse incentive to continue that awful, degraded, inhuman process of crossing this border illegally.
So I'm not interested in any sort of amnesty for those dreamers until that border is locked down.
Alright, this question comes from Mick.
He says, Dear Michael, what are the top arguments against Keynesian economics as the left commonly uses those arguments to justify their socialist or government spending policies?
Yeah, that's referring to John Maynard Keynes, who is...
Really misrepresented, I think, in the culture.
John Maynard Keynes is an interesting thinker and an economist, but all we ever think of him for is pumping money into the federal government, pumping the economy full of money.
We think of him as relating to FDR's policies.
The idea being that the government should be the driver of economic growth.
That's how Keynes is used in popular economic arguments.
But of course, the government is not productive.
By definition, the public sector is not productive.
The only productive part of the economy is the private sector.
That's where the government gets all of its money from.
So eventually, as is always the problem with socialism, and by the way, I'm not giving some sort of sophisticated academic dissertation on John Maynard Keynes.
I'm describing him as he is used in popular arguments.
The problem with those arguments is the problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher observed, which is eventually you run out of other people's money.
And it might take a very long time.
And the people might not feel when they run out of money.
And you actually might just borrow money from China to run up that debt.
You might be able to run up 20, 22 trillion dollars of debt.
But eventually, the jig is up and you realize that you do not have any of that money.
And we can try to think of all these cute little ways around the fact that in order to produce wealth, you need to produce anything at all.
But ultimately, the way to wealth is the productive sectors of the economy.
Not the government borrowing or printing or taxing more money.
Alright, next question.
Another Jonathan says, Dear Master of Covfefe.
Do I say that right?
You're saying it right.
President Trump actually says it wrong, but you're saying it right.
I say it totally right.
Can you explain some of the greatest accomplishments of Calvin Coolidge and why you think of him as one of the best U.S. presidents?
He shrunk the government.
That's it.
That begins and ends there.
Calvin Coolidge.
He also had a pet raccoon.
That's cool.
That's a cool story.
They're mean, though.
They are.
They're not really supposed to be kept as pets.
I had one kill a cat one time.
Really?
Well, I kind of like that.
You know, I mean, really, like, taking a strong, firm stand as president.
He shrunk the government.
That's why.
That's why conservatives love Calvin Coolidge.
No other president has shrunk the government.
Ronald Reagan tried to shrink the government.
The Democrats wouldn't let him.
President Trump, I don't know that he's really tried to shrink the government.
He's reduced some wastes and inefficiencies.
He's shrunk some departments.
But all of the conservative ideologies that have cropped up over the last hundred years, starve the beast, shrink the government.
The larger the federal government, the smaller the citizen.
The government is best which governs least.
All of those you actually see come to fruition in Calvin Coolidge.
He came to office after Warren Harding, another very maligned president who actually was not too bad.
And for the last hundred years, we haven't had anybody shrink the government.
It would be nice if we did, but I'm not holding my breath.
Only Silent Cal was able to do it.
Cheers.
Alrighty.
So you celebrated him on President's Day?
I celebrate Coolidge, yeah.
Since now President's Day is about all presidents?
I don't even use the term.
I mean, you know, the federal holiday is Washington's birthday.
Yes.
We do not have an official holiday of President's Day.
I do not want to celebrate Franklin Pierce or Millard Fillmore.
I'm not celebrating the office of the president.
We don't have Congress Day.
We don't have Supreme Court Day.
I am celebrating George Washington, the greatest president, all-time champ, never getting beat, and all the rest of those guys, you know, fine, whatever, but you don't get a day.
I celebrate the sales.
The sales.
That's right.
You can buy bedding.
Apparently, if you need a mattress and a car, President's Day weekend is the time to go, folks.
That's what advertising tells me anyway.
Yeah, but if we're just celebrating sheets on President's Day, I guess we're only celebrating the Democrat presidents, if you know what I'm saying.
Catch that?
Moving along.
Anyway.
Mick says, Michael, what is the reading or strategy technique that you use because you're able to recall and remember and explain so succinctly and explain the philosophies of numerous writers and numerous philosophers?
Stop it.
You're going to make me blush.
It is very important to make time to read every day.
I actually don't succeed at it every single day.
I always try to leave at least an hour to read, and some days I just run out of time.
So you have to just read 30 pages a day.
If you can set aside time to read 30 pages a day, you don't have to speed read.
You don't have to just read those 30 pages.
Even if you don't understand everything, just push through.
You will retain a lot.
The other thing that has helped is...
I have worked as an actor in my life, and you do learn how to memorize things very quickly for the short term and the long term.
This does help.
Work on your memorization.
You don't need to be an actor.
You don't need to work and give speeches or anything.
Work on it just for yourself.
One great way to do this is to memorize poems.
In the old days, people would memorize poems in school from the time they were a kid to graduating high school.
Or in the Bible Belt, we have the Bible Memorization Clubs.
Bible memorization, memorizing psalms.
This is really helpful.
You should do both.
I mean, there are poems that I learned in seventh grade that I can recall word perfect.
There are monologues I learned as an actor that I can recall word perfect.
And it really helps.
I think in our modern culture, we're in cell phone land, so we don't memorize anything.
The curricula now tell you, don't memorize facts.
Don't memorize biographies.
Just, you know, learn how to think.
Learn broad trends.
But if you don't learn the facts, then you won't learn how to think.
That's the little secret they don't tell you.
I think even as an adult...
Take a moment, memorize a poem, memorize a psalm, memorize Bible verses, whatever.
That will help you retain more when then you set aside an hour every single night to read philosophy or history or novels or whatever you're going to read.
And so your anniversary is?
Like, my wedding anniversary?
Yeah, well, you just said that you're such a great person at memorizing things, so I'm just checking in for your wife.
It's somewhere in 28th, June or July.
June 2nd, thank you very much.
October 24th is her birthday.
Just checking for Mrs.
Knowles.
And if I got either of those wrong, by the way, we're going to need to fix that in post before sweet little Elisa sees this.
This is live.
No!
By the way, babe, if you're watching, 10 years coming up, so...
Alright, this question comes from Norm.
How and why was Andrew Jackson a great president?
You know, look, a lot of conservatives bash Andrew Jackson and they say he was a terrible president.
I don't do that.
He was the hero of New Orleans.
He was a strong man, a good military leader, not a terrible president.
He is harangued because he was a big populist.
So he let everybody into the White House and they trashed the place and broke all the china and Poured booze everywhere.
He instituted the Trail of Tears.
He was a little harsh on the Native Americans.
Elizabeth Warren's people.
Elizabeth Warren's people.
He sent Elizabeth Warren's great, great, great, great grandfather packing.
That was not so nice.
He showed...
Very little deference to the court.
He famously, I believe it was Andrew Jackson who said, the chief justice has issued his opinion, now let him enforce it.
So he had a more expanded view of the presidency.
These are reasons that conservatives attack him.
I think a little bit of it is unfair.
I think they go after him because he's the founder of the modern Democrat Party.
And so we're all willing to take cheap shots at him whenever we want.
Those don't sound like cheap shots, though.
Well, some more than others.
The expanded view of the presidency, I don't think that that's necessarily terrible.
I think a lot of conservatives take an overly broad view of the powers of the legislature.
As for the populism, I think a lot of elitist conservatives who want to have their nose in the air and never relate to practical politics take a dismal view of the people.
But I like the people.
I think it's perfectly fine.
In a democratic republic to appeal to people, and Andrew Jackson did that as well.
So he's actually a mixed bag.
I know this is going to irritate the left and the right, but his presidency, I think, needs to be considered on the whole.
And on the whole, he did some great things and he did some bad things.
Like most presidents.
Like, yeah, that's true.
You know, some, I mean, Millard Fillmore was just a bad president.
Franklin Pierce was just a bad president.
Also, Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson, he was just a bad president.
Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy, you were actually, now Andrew Jackson is really rising in my estimation when I consider all of these guys.
Yeah, especially Jimmy, dear lord.
Matt says, Michael, are you working on a new book?
And if so, what is it going to be about?
I actually am, I'm sorry to say.
Is it a sequel?
Is it a sequel?
Well, I've got the revised and expanded edition of Reasons to Vote for Democrats coming out in 10 years.
But I actually am working on a book with words, but I'm not going to speak about it publicly.
One, because I don't want you to steal my book.
And two, because writing a book with words, it turns out, is a very tedious task.
And so I don't want people to put me on a timeline.
But I find that sometimes when you project what you're doing, publicly it holds you accountable.
Yeah, I hate accountability.
Are you kidding me?
I don't want any accountability or responsibility.
Isn't religion accountability?
Yeah, that's to the big guy.
He already knows what I'm doing.
It's very tough to fool that guy.
Yeah, it's true.
But you, I can fool.
Jimmy says, Michael, is atheism a defensible or valid worldview?
Nope.
Next question.
It's not.
It's not defensible.
It's not valid.
But I've held that view for a long period of time, especially when I was younger.
And dumb.
When I was young and dumb, yeah.
But no, between the ages of 13 and 23, I would have called myself an atheist or an agnostic.
I think a lot of precocious 13-year-olds are attracted to atheism.
I think...
Precocious 13-year-olds are exactly the right temperament for atheism because it appeals to intellectual pride and ignorance.
There's a reason why the greatest geniuses throughout all of history have believed in a very similar concept of God all the way from the ancient Greeks through the present.
There's no really good argument for atheism.
The best argument for atheism is suffering.
The fact that there is suffering and injustice in the world.
Um...
However, I think that actually ends up being an argument for God.
There are many very good arguments for God from the ontological by Anselm of Canterbury through the Thomistic arguments for God.
The cosmological argument is very popular.
So if you want to appeal to your own intellectual pride, all of the arguments for God are far better than the arguments against God.
Ultimately, though, these arguments are just arguments, and all meaningful speech depends upon...
The ultimate meaning and the ultimate truth with a capital T, which is God, so those arguments actually sort of beg the question.
Ultimately, we're talking about faith.
Reason can get you to a certain point, and then there is faith that enters in, there is revelation.
Revelation is very important as well.
For my process back to God, I relied on intellectual arguments, then I read a lot of good writers about this, then I looked throughout history, I was delving into philosophy, and only at that point did I arrive at what would be called the numinous or religious experience.
For some people, it's exactly the opposite.
Maybe it's better for it to be exactly the opposite.
It kind of goes in a little faster.
For me, I was very stubborn about it.
But regardless of which way you're going to enter, if you're entering from an emotional view, a spiritual point of view, an intellectual point of view, historical, philosophical, through any way The arguments for God are far better than the arguments against God, which I think are basically just fantasies.
People say that believing in God is wishful thinking.
I don't really buy that.
I think atheism is wishful thinking.
Some people wish that they won't be held accountable for what they do.
Some people wish that life doesn't actually have meaning, that there's not a transcendent moral order, that there isn't virtue, that there isn't telos, that there isn't purpose in your life because it allows you to be decadent at whatever you're doing right now.
But that's wishful thinking, buddy, and it's not a great thing Ultimately, you know, C.S. Lewis said, it's one of my favorite lines on the subject, if you look for truth, you might find comfort in the end.
But if you look for comfort, you will not find truth or comfort, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
So, put the truth above all things, and I think that will lead you to the truth and the way and the life.
I mean, talk about the memorization skills with that quote at the end there.
You know, Winston Churchill said, maybe apocryphally, but I think he actually said this one, that it is good for a young man who is uneducated to read a book of quotations.
And that's, I think, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Evan says, Michael, congrats on 300 episodes.
There you go.
I actually had forgotten that.
I had my 300th episode today.
And you're still here.
That's 100 times the number of episodes that Ben initially had signed up for.
I never thought that Ben could fail at anything except apparently at firing you.
Sorry, Ben.
Evan wants to know, being that you are so extra-able, could you please tell us how your show got the green light?
Being as I'm so excellent, I don't know.
I think that shows are given to excellence, and excellence is rewarded by getting a show.
You know, I've often wondered this myself.
How did it get the green light?
I have famously on my set, I have a check from Ben for $400 framed because he and I made a bet about the presidential election.
And then I won the bet and he had to give me the check and he was very upset about this.
Then I published a blank book and I sold more books with no words.
Then Ben has probably written a dozen books and I sold more books altogether.
And Ben was very angry about this.
And then he helped me promote the book, and then he helped me, got me a literary agent, all these things.
So I think what it is with Ben is that he's got, in all of his brilliant broadcasting, he's got this deep masochistic core.
And I think it's this essential masochism that got him to greenlight my show and has led him to keep it around for 300 episodes.
Let's be honest, though.
How many cigars did you buy The God King?
Oh, well, there's no question.
I mean, every penny that I get from Ben, I just have to constantly bribe back to Jeremy the God King not to cancel my show.
But I assume that's just a cost of doing business.
That's right.
Yeah, it goes right back in.
Are we back in Keynesian economics?
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
John says, what is the best way to approach the study of history outside of the classroom?
And do you think that there are any areas of history that are underrated?
Oh, of course, where to begin?
The way to approach the study of history outside of the classroom is to read the history that interests you.
That's the only way that you can do it.
I don't think you can convince yourself to be interested in some period of history if you're not, and you're not going to take that time, which would be your leisure time, And study something that doesn't interest you.
So just go exactly where you want to go.
Go for the dessert first.
Skip the salad.
Go right for the thing that most interests you.
Because that will open up a lot of other historical understanding to you for eras and periods and people and places that you might not have even known existed.
And then you'll sort of find a path down there.
The most underrated era of history are the Middle Ages, which...
Some people persist in calling the Dark Ages, this is a ridiculous epithet that was developed during the Renaissance by people who thought that they were better than all of those ignorant idiots that came before them.
You know, like Thomas Aquinas, or Dante, or the greatest thinkers in all of history.
That period is hugely...
Underrated and misrepresented, and it provides a lot of terrifically interesting history, to say nothing of philosophy, poetry, all of literature, theology.
I really like to focus there on medieval history.
British history, medieval, continental, and Italian history and literature.
You know, Dante is my favorite poet, greatest poet ever in all of history.
So I really like to focus there.
But if that doesn't interest you, go where, whatever interests you.
Reading any history will open you up and expose you to much, much more.
You'd be a good homeschool parent.
Hey, when Ben finally fires me, I can be a homeschool parent.
Because, well, first you have to be a parent.
That's true, yeah.
Which I mean, come on, it's almost a year.
I know, I've got to get more Catholic about things.
But that would be a very homeschool parent answer of what is your child interested in, and then take that and that's how you educate them.
And I would say the same thing about reading, whether it comes to politics or history or any topic.
Right.
I mean, obviously there are some parameters.
You need to cover certain things.
But if they're really pushing back against it, you might not want to belabor it.
You might maybe go and allow people to follow intellectual paths that they want to follow.
I've always kind of decided my own course of education.
I've always, from the time I was 10 or something...
Pushed in certain directions, followed certain paths, and to try to stop a kid from doing that is probably futile, and to try to divert them to another path also probably not going to yield much in the way of results.
True.
David says, who is your favorite philosopher?
You just told us that Dante was your favorite poet.
Certainly.
How can you pick a favorite philosopher?
There's no way to do that.
And what is a philosophy?
George W. Bush was asked this question, and he said, Jesus Christ, because he changed my heart.
But Jesus isn't a philosopher.
He's a savior.
He's God.
He's the divine logic of the universe.
So, I don't know.
If that answer suffices, then I guess that would be my answer.
Who are some great philosophers?
Aristotle and Plato probably figured out just about everything, and there hasn't been much to say since then.
Thomas Aquinas does Aristotle better than Aristotle does, and Alistair MacIntyre, who's a more modern philosopher, recognizes this and has a terrific modern book, After Virtue.
So I really like him.
I'll just throw out a few names other than Aristotle and Plato.
He's got like a top five.
Yeah, top five.
I mean, we all know, obviously, everyone loves the Enlightenment philosophers who I think are very overrated.
But just a few names that maybe you haven't heard of might be worth reading.
Alistair MacIntyre's book is very good.
One of my favorite books written in the last hundred years is Poetic Diction by Owen Barfield.
It's a study of meaning and a theory of knowledge.
Does that sound a little bit in the clouds?
It is.
It's a very difficult book to get through, but it is tremendous reading.
It is a must-read For conservatives and Christians alike.
That guy's name is Owen Barfield.
He was an inkling along with C.S. Lewis and his friends with Chesterton, too, I believe.
As for those guys, Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, C.S. Lewis, kind of modern philosophers and writers.
Those are terrific guys to read.
Yeah, we'll stick with that for now.
That's a lot of reading.
That's a lot of reading.
I explicitly don't want to cover all of those Enlightenment philosophers because I just, you know, guys, people had thoughts before John Locke.
The Locke worship in this country is so ridiculous.
Don't knock Locke.
I'm perfectly willing to knock Locke.
I don't think you need to knock Locke.
I just have to counterbalance.
I'm a fan of Aristotle, but just to be a fan of Aristotle doesn't mean that you have to knock Locke.
Maybe it doesn't.
They're all fine.
They're trying to work through things.
Kant is trying to work through things.
These more modern philosophers are trying to work through basically the collapse of the Western mind.
And so they're doing their best, but come on.
There's more to life than that.
Another modern philosopher who is an answer to all of those guys that you should read is Michael Oakeshott, a British conservative.
He has never read anymore, but you should read him.
I'm sorry, but my brain every single time I hear Kant now goes to that amazing TV show, The Good Place.
Yes, that's true.
It's sad that that's where culture is.
That's a good show.
It is such a good show.
It's a very thoughtful show.
It's so well written and it's so good.
John wants to know, totally switching topics here, we went from poems and philosophers now to sports.
Do you know about sports?
I've heard of the sports.
You've heard of the sports.
I like the Yankees.
My entire knowledge of sports is the New York Yankees.
Are you a fan of the New York Rangers?
Because this guy has a question.
John wants to know, what are your opinions about the Miracle on Ice or just hockey in general?
Is that some new ice dancing show, the Miracle on Ice story?
Is that...
No, that's the Soviet thing, right?
Yeah, no, that's great.
Kurt Russell was in a Disney movie about it.
I know, no, that's great.
I mean, I'm only feigning some of my ignorance there.
That's great.
I really like sports when they involve, like, nuclear war.
So when it's the United States and this damn Russian communist.
We're embarrassing Hitler.
I mean, that was really great.
That's right, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
I'm all for that.
I think that's great.
This is actually the reason why kneeling for the flag in football is so wrong, is because sports are a national game.
Sports embody a certain kind of politics, and you shouldn't be disloyal to your country in sports.
That undermines the whole purpose of sports, and Miracle on Ice is a good example on this.
Hockey is fine.
I don't watch it very much.
When I get invited to go see a game, I'm happy to, and it's kind of fun.
But the most fun part, of course, is when they take off the gloves and start punching each other in the face.
So I guess what I really like is boxing.
But hockey is good, too.
It's a good substitute.
Boxing can be fun.
Boxing?
Yeah.
It's fun to watch.
Yeah.
I don't think it's great to do.
I know nothing about sports and I once went on a date with a guy and he brought me to a Rangers vs.
Islanders game and I didn't realize it was like a rivalry.
World War 3.
And let's just say I just wore white.
That was probably good.
I wore white.
I think their colors are similar but it was interesting.
Right.
So we're going to get back to more questions.
There's some questions about your taste in music coming up.
I got a preview of those.
That'll be really fun.
And people are watching right now.
They're able to watch on all of our platforms, which is really cool.
But they might be saying, hey, how do I get to ask a question?
Well, only our incredible Daily Wire subscribers get to do that.
So be sure to click on the link in the video description to ask those questions or sign up to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
And don't forget, tune in for next month's episode featuring our very own Ben Shapiro, who has yet to fire this month's edition of The Conversation.
Now, we don't know what happens between now and the next month, so we'll see.
You might have some more questions for him.
My birthday is this weekend, and Ben knows what I want.
Grant wants to know, Dear King of Covfefe, do you enjoy Queen's music, and do you have a favorite song?
I love Queen.
You know, I don't listen to a ton of modern music.
You know, I'm like good and appropriately stodgy like conservatives.
There are a few exceptions.
Love Van Morrison.
Oh, good.
Love Queen.
I love Queen.
I've loved Queen since I was like three or four years old.
Because as far as pop music goes, those guys are so musical.
They were always so musical.
I love that it was big.
It was operatic.
It wasn't this wimpy, stupid...
Modern, wah-wah, apathetic rock music.
It was huge.
Hey now, don't get on Led Zeppelin.
You're doing that wah-wah noise.
You're trying to be like Robert Plant there for a second.
I was about to go fisticuffs with you.
I just mean all that whiny hipster stuff today.
Basically, everything from Green Day to the present is just so like...
I hate my dad.
You don't want to be an American idiot?
Yeah, I mean, like, oh, give me a break.
Whereas Queen had this beautiful theatricality, beautiful musicality to it.
I don't know where to begin.
I love all their stuff.
I love...
Do you have a favorite?
Yeah, I love good old-fashioned Loverboy.
I mean, I love...
I thought you were going to say Fat Bottom Girls.
I love Fat Bottom Girls.
I mean, I love the disco song.
What's the...
Another One Bites the Dust.
Great song.
Obviously, Bohemian Rhapsody is the greatest pop song ever written.
Do you have a Queen karaoke song of choice?
Well, Bohemian Rhapsody is the obvious one.
The trouble is that Freddie Mercury had like a 17 octave range, and I have about four notes that I can vary between.
I love The Show Must Go On.
I love Flash.
Man, I just love Queen.
I'm in love with my car.
They just had such whimsy.
They didn't take themselves too seriously, but they took pop music seriously, much more seriously than other bands.
Yeah, they're great.
Great example of a good contemporary band.
So along the lines of Queens, we have a very special episode of Backstage coming up on Monday, and Bohemian Rhapsody is up for some nominations.
I thought you were calling us all Queens in our tuxedos, but that's good.
You're referring to the movie about Bohemian Rhapsody.
I'm saying that next week on Backstage, something will be discussed that's going to be a lot of fun, and I'm sure Bohemian Rhapsody will come up.
That's true.
Did you see the movie, and are you a fan of the movie?
Love the movie.
I thought it was terrific.
I think the campaign against the movie and trying to wrap Ryan Singer around their necks is pathetic and absurd, and it's from envious people in Hollywood who don't want that movie to win the Oscar.
Was it the greatest movie of all time?
Is it going to change your life?
No.
But as far as popcorn movies go that tell you a little bit about the band, it was excellent, highly entertaining.
It dealt seriously with the complexity of Freddie Mercury's sexuality.
A lot of people just want to make Freddie Mercury into this gay icon and he never even kissed a woman.
Freddie Mercury had a very complex sexuality.
He was a complex man.
He had a very complex inner life.
And the film deals seriously in that.
I think kudos to them.
They did a terrific job.
Queen and Adam Lambert are going to be performing at the Oscars.
So we'll see how that goes.
Alright, I have yet to see the movie.
I need to just run it when it comes out on iTunes.
Alright, moving on.
Evan says, Mike, you get called Mike?
I'm a real tough guy.
Back when I'm in the neighborhood with Alex from the Bronx.
Yo, Mike, he wants to know your position on tattoos.
But what do you think of a religious one like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro's alter ego?
Wait, he just called Matt Walsh Ben Shapiro's alter ego.
I could see that.
That is hilarious.
Ben is pessimistic and Matt is very pessimistic.
So he talks about Matt Walsh's tattoo and he says that it's on the inside of his forearm.
Right.
So is that okay?
He has the Cairo.
My position on tattoos is that only Marines and criminals are allowed to have tattoos and nobody else is allowed to have them.
Navy SEALs?
Yeah, that's fine.
I guess broadly speaking, well, yeah, definitely seals.
Definitely the sea-based branches of the military.
But I guess we can extend it to the Army and the Coast Guard as well.
People who are in the military service are allowed to have tattoos, and maybe should have tattoos.
Convicts also.
Why?
Because there's something brutal about tattoos.
And it's something that we want our warriors to have, and it's something we expect from...
From real tough guys out on the street alike.
I'm not saying that there's a moral quality to the tattoos.
I'm saying that is the physical connotation of them.
There's a brutality to it.
There's a real toughness to it.
And obviously in the case of servicemen, toughness is used for good.
In the case of criminals, toughness is used for bad.
What I don't like is when these hipsters get random tattoos.
I saw somebody the other day had a tattoo of citrus fruit on each of her kneecaps.
Just giant oranges or something or grapefruits.
That is not good.
One, because very often it makes pretty girls look less pretty, and that is upsetting to me.
It makes silly hipster millennial guys look even sillier and more hipster and more millennial, and that is upsetting.
But then the philosophical problem is some tattoos, maybe it's really meaningful to you, It's some psalm or something, or it's a Cairo format.
Okay, I can get that a little bit.
The ones that I really don't like are the nihilistic ones.
The ones, and I see this, people will have a sleeve of just random nonsense.
I saw a guy at the Apple store once.
He had a tattoo here of a little mustache, and then he had a tattoo here, and it said...
A bad word, which in French is mailed, cray.
S-H, asterisk, asterisk, cray, with a little tiny mustache.
That is meaningless, and it is a celebration of meaningless.
And what it says is, my flesh is meaningless, and my life is meaningless, and we're all just going to turn to dirt and nothing makes any sense.
S-H star star cray.
That's what that means.
I hate those.
That's very inhuman.
I guess of all the non-criminal, non- military tattoos, a giant Kairo on your arm is pretty good, but that's about as far as I'm willing to go.
Folks, you tune into the conversation to see what they really think.
There you go.
GB says, Michael, will conservatives ever be fairly represented in mainstream media or universities?
We were just talking about this earlier.
And what will the endgame of their leftist bias and propaganda be?
I don't think we'll ever be...
We're represented fairly in the mainstream media.
We've been trying to do it now for 70 years and it hasn't worked out.
And actually the only way that we've gotten our voices out is through the new media, through building our own setups.
No giant corporate entity owns us, owns the Daily Wire, owns my show.
So we get to say whatever we want.
That would not be true if we were working for any of the major networks.
I don't really see that happening anytime soon.
I won't hold my breath for it.
In the universities, what has happened to the universities over the last 50 years has been criminal.
I'm not saying that universities will ever have a conservative bias or a right-leaning bias.
I don't think that will ever happen.
I think they will always lean left.
What they have done now, though, for the last 50 years, is hollowed out education itself.
You've had people marching through the universities saying, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.
At Notre Dame, they are now covering up artwork of Christopher Columbus, like the Taliban.
At least they haven't knocked down the walls yet.
But they are covering up artwork because they are so afraid of exposing their students to art and history because the facts might offend them.
Truth might offend them.
That is horrific.
And universities that have given into that nonsense should first try to fire their presidents and their administrators and the deputy assistant, deputy assistant, deputy assistant dean of inclusion and diversity and assistants and deputies.
They should first try to do that.
If that doesn't work, they should knock it down with a bulldozer and try again because there is nothing left.
They are already in ruins philosophically and physically they should match that as well.
Not a rosy outlook.
And I'm a defender of media, and one way that we can fix that is we have our own media.
I'm a huge defender of liberal education.
Not just trade schools, not just STEM, not just majoring in something useful or practical.
I love liberal education.
It is the only way that a society can make sense of its freedom.
That's the point of the liberal arts.
In your freedom, in your free time, in your leisure, how do we make sense and earn the freedom that has been given to us?
How do we govern ourselves, for instance?
How do we comport ourselves in our daily lives?
That has been hollowed out from within by the left, and conservatives need to figure out a way to provide that.
And saying, trade school, skip college, go get a job, that is...
Not a bad idea, but that is insufficient.
The universities aren't doing it, so we need to create our own version of the university explicitly to defend liberal education, or we will not be able to maintain our freedom.
All right.
Samantha says, Hey Michael, have you been made aware of the Twitter account of your pet fish?
You know that there's also one for Matt Walsh's car?
There's one for Ben's yarmulke.
I just found out about this the other day.
And I think Drew's beard.
Which, let's say, hashtag team beard.
Do you run that account or do you know the person who does run it?
No, I don't.
It's no one at our office.
No, I don't run it.
I don't know who does run it.
I also can't figure out if that account likes me or not.
I guess that I had, in passing, referred to my pet goldfish or something, so this account pops up.
But I can't tell if they like me or not, or if they're criticizing the show.
Anyway, it's very funny.
I get a kick out of it and I retweet it sometimes.
Especially when your fish and Matt Walsh's car get into fights over who's the favorite.
Over Turf Wars.
I think it's my cross-conspiracy corner for a moment.
I think it's the same person that's doing all of these accounts.
I guess that would make sense.
And it has to be like a massive Daily Wire fan, even if they're hate-watching your show.
Maybe.
Or just the insanity has spread, you know, and different people are running all the different accounts.
That's great.
I get a kick out of it.
The entire internet is basically designed for whimsy, weirdness, and frivolity, and definitely all of those accounts check those boxes, so great.
They're doing the internet right.
Love it.
Philip says that he has a family who doesn't see an issue with taking advantage of government programs, and how can he convince them that it is bad for their character?
This is a tough one, because sometimes people need assistance.
I mean, our economy is built such that there is unemployment built into it, not long-term unemployment, but short-term unemployment is built into the system itself, and so you pay into unemployment insurance, you should be able to access it when you need it.
No problem with that.
The trouble is that social safety nets can become spider webs.
They can entrap you in them.
And they can make you dependent, and they can make you lazy, and they can make you unambitious, and they can make you depressed, and they can make you have a bad life.
And this is built into the system, too.
And you have to be very careful.
I don't begrudge anybody who's having a tough time for a short period of time to use those programs.
And I'm not telling you to watch out for them because I don't want to pay, or I don't want taxpayers to have to fund you.
That's not why.
It's for you.
It is all for you.
It corrodes your ambition.
And a good example of this, I think Dinesh D'Souza made this point a few years ago.
If I'm walking by a bum on the street and I'm eating a sandwich, and the bum says, hey, I'm hungry, can I have some of that sandwich?
I could give him that sandwich.
That's a moral transaction.
I have given charity.
That's a good thing.
The bum is getting the food.
I guess that's a good thing.
The bum feels gratitude to me because I've done him a favor.
Now, if the bum asks me for the sandwich and then Barack Obama rides up on a white horse with a gun in his hand and he points the gun at me and says, give him the sandwich.
That is not a moral transaction.
I resent Barack Obama for stealing my sandwich and making me give it away.
Barack Obama has done nothing here.
It costs him nothing.
He's just a bully making me give away my sandwich.
And the bum doesn't feel gratitude to me.
He feels entitlement to my sandwich because the long arm of the state has just come up and told him that he is entitled to my sandwich.
That is not my sandwich.
You didn't build that.
That isn't yours.
That feeling of entitlement, that feeling of self-pity, that feeling of ungratefulness, ingratitude, is a huge danger.
And the longer you are on these government programs on the dole taking handouts...
It is inevitable that that is going to seep in.
And you will not feel gratitude.
You will feel resentment.
You will not be helped back on your feet.
You will be pushed lower and lower and be stuck in that spider web.
It is death to character, and you've got to get out as soon as you can.
Alrighty.
Ryan wants to know, what's your opinion on in vitro fertilization?
I oppose in vitro fertilization.
This is a dividing line in the pro-life movement.
The reason I oppose in vitro fertilization is that in vitro fertilization entails abortions.
It entails the creation of lines of embryos, which are individual human lives.
They are little babies that you can't quite see yet, but it is the creation of individual human life that are then discarded.
They are either thrown away or they are destroyed or they are implanted.
And then you have four or eight kids and then some are selectively aborted.
A couple...
Examples of this have happened where it hasn't entailed abortion.
The greatest example is Octomom.
She went through this.
She ended up having the eight kids all stick, you know, and as a result of that, because I guess she's pro-life, she wouldn't kill any of them and made this heroic choice to have all eight kids.
Most people don't do that.
You might say, well, why don't you just create one baby and just implant one and see if it works?
That can't happen because it's extraordinarily expensive.
So if somebody is going to go through the effort of doing this, they can't take that risk.
It's a very high risk that the fertilized egg doesn't implant.
So you're...
In practice, when you're doing IVF, you're always going to be creating more embryos and you're going to be discarding them.
This is an offense to human dignity.
This is an offense to bioethics.
And I know it seems for pro-lifers, like, well, we just want more life.
It's not like abortion.
We want more life.
But this is one of those tough subjects where the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And I think it would...
Well, we obviously have to fight the abortion battle.
We're killing a million babies a year in the United States.
We also should work into our pro-life message that even those who have the opposite intention, not to destroy life but to create life, can have that unintended consequence.
And we cannot accept the premises of IVF because the premises of IVF are the premises of abortion.
I think especially, like, it's a little...
Brave New World, too, when you start to hear, maybe that's the wrong analogy to use, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend or Kim Kardashian West and Kanye, that when they do do that, they choose the gender.
Well, this is the thing.
I don't typically like slippery slope arguments, but if that's the top of the slope, it's going to be real slippery.
Polls show that huge portions of Americans would favor sex-selective abortions.
Just to use one example.
They would, at this point, if you've got eight kids that you can choose from, you can choose your baby, designer babies.
And you even hear the language, you see this all throughout the literature, of balancing our family.
We already have two daughters, so we're going to balance our family by having a boy.
What that means is you're killing the girl in the womb.
You're selecting against the girl to balance your family.
What that means is discarding your child and killing your child.
It's very brave new worldly, of course, and as we see the rise of gene editing, gene edited babies in China now, which affects not just that baby, but the whole genetic line, all the way in perpetuity.
These are bioethical questions that unfortunately our society, which is now increasingly What is your favorite color?
Green.
What shade of green, though?
Because I'm a girl, so there's lots of greens.
Forest green is the crayon in the box.
It's my favorite.
Oh, my gosh.
That's all.
Do you still color?
All the time.
Do you have an adult coloring book?
They have these now.
Oh, it's so sad.
They have adult coloring books.
Some of them are really intense.
I'm sure they are.
I'm sure.
Good job, 39-year-old millennial living in your parents' basement.
You colored inside the lines.
With the mustache tattoo.
With the mustache tattoo and says, S.H. Star Star Cray.
S.H. Star Star Cray with your adult coloring books.
Alright, David has a really interesting question.
Who is your favorite Democratic president?
Andrew Jackson.
I can't think of a better one.
That was real easy.
You know, Thomas Jefferson, Democrats try to claim him, but he doesn't really count.
Is he a federalist?
Is he an anti-federalist?
Is he a Republican?
Is he Jeffersonian?
So you don't think he would count as a Democrat?
No.
No, no.
It's totally disingenuous to call him a Democrat.
Interesting.
I guess Andrew Jackson, really, I would trace the Democrat party to Andrew Jackson, and it's only gone downhill ever since him, so I guess by default he's my favorite.
All righty.
Ryan says, Hi, Michael.
Do you think there's a link between the decline in religiosity in America and the rise in the opioid crisis in America?
Of course.
Of course it is.
And not just the opioid crisis.
The opioid crisis is tied directly to the decrease in the life expectancy of Americans, which has decreased now for two years, for the first time in 50 years.
Why is it decreasing?
It's not decreasing because our nutrition is getting any worse.
It's decreasing because of drug overdoses and suicide.
And why are people killing themselves and why are they giving themselves drugs and overdosing on that?
It is because of a decline of religiosity.
Religiosity has plummeted.
The number of people who have been raised without a religious tradition has skyrocketed.
The people who are religiously unaffiliated or who call themselves spiritual but not religious has exploded.
Spiritual but not religious, by the way, means I refuse to contemplate God, but I find myself very interesting.
So they use this ridiculous term.
Spiritual but not religious maybe can be a way to be led to true religion, but you've got to start taking it seriously.
And it has been said ad nauseum, I don't even know who first said it, that all political problems are theological problems.
St.
Andrew Breitbart said politics is downstream of culture.
Culture is downstream of religion.
Culture and cult are etymologically related.
What a culture worships defines that culture.
And our culture is starving for purpose, starving for meaning.
They've bought this lie peddled by cynical fools like the new atheists who say that life is meaningless.
It's a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
We turn to warm food and we take a dirt nap when we die.
That just isn't true.
There's very little evidence for this.
There's just enough evidence for it to convince people who have only thought in a shallow way or who are only viewing the world in a shallow way.
But it isn't true.
And you'll find it out one day.
It is not true.
And as a result, you see studies that come out that millennials, more than other generations, are looking for meaning and purpose in their careers, in their daily lives.
They're looking for it because they don't have it.
They don't have a sense of it.
They've been robbed of that by their parents and by their teachers and by culture.
And, frankly, by their religious leaders who have watered down the faith into nothing.
Don't even get me started.
It's a real problem throughout, certainly in the Catholic Church, and as far as I can tell from a distance, throughout the Protestant churches as well.
That is a terrible crisis.
And so, for conservatives who are atheistic or irreligious or agnostic, I want you in the tent.
I love your help.
We should all be allies.
However, we will not fix even one single political problem for very long if we don't fix the question of religiosity and irreligiosity in the country.
And that problem doesn't show any signs of slowing down.
Alright, Jacob says, with the current climate of gun control, what are your views, and is there a way for you to see an idea which could solve this problem in American politics?
I always practice gun control.
I use both hands.
That's my entire view on gun control.
I love the right to keep and bear arms.
I exercise my right to keep and bear arms.
I recommend that you all do it too.
It's the closest opinion I have to feminism, because it's the only thing that has ever been devised on this earth that can make a woman as physically strong as a man, is having a gun and knowing how to shoot that gun.
The left is trying to grab our guns because they want to take away our liberty.
There is no other way to describe it.
That's all it comes down to.
It has nothing to do with protecting people.
None of the major shootings over the last ten years would have been prevented by any of the gun control proposals over the last ten years.
The left always harps on the AR-15 because they call it an assault rifle, which it's certainly not.
They call it an assault weapon, which is a ridiculous made-up term.
Also, assault weapons, the AR-15, kills relatively very few people per year.
Handguns.
Or used in killing many, many more people every year.
Multiples more people than assault weapons.
Via suicide.
And two-thirds of that is just via suicide, and it's mostly middle-aged white guys.
Why does the left focus on the assault weapon?
Because it's not about saving lives, it's about taking away your...
Weapons, your right to protect yourself.
Why?
We saw this in the Green New Deal when they showed the Green New Deal proposal.
You think the Green New Deal is just about protecting the natural environment.
No, it's about a universal basic income.
It's about federal takeover of a bunch of industries.
It's about a socialist health care regime.
It's about taking away your rights as a patient.
The same thing is true of gun control legislation.
They say, oh, it's just about protecting people.
No, it's not.
It's about all of those other things.
It's about more government control and less liberty.
We should push back against it, fight back at every single step.
There is no conciliation.
There is no meeting halfway.
There is no compromise.
We keep our guns.
Come and take it.
Tyler says, hey Michael, do you have any suggested readings about debunking the myths of Columbus or the left's perpetual guilt of colonialism?
Yes, I recommend you read the advertisement for my speech at Notre Dame on Thursday and then you watch it.
Just tune in.
And tune in because I'm going to be going through for half an hour or an hour debunking the myths surrounding Christopher Columbus and going through the true history of him.
I also highly recommend a peerless biography of Columbus, Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
There are also a lot of basically contemporary biographies of Columbus written by people who were there with him at the time.
So you can look at those.
There are I mean, there's Columbus and the quest for Jerusalem.
I mean, there are just wonderful biographies on him.
They're not all conservative, by the way.
You can even read, most of them I would say are probably left-leaning, but they give you the facts.
The woman, I think it was, who was it?
Carol Delaney, who wrote Columbus and the Crest for Jerusalem, I don't think she would be considered some arch-right winger.
And she said, the trouble with the modern attack on Columbus is that they are blaming him for things that he never did.
They're blaming him for things that other people did or that never happened in the first place.
And so even in a left-wing biography of Columbus, you're at least going to get the facts.
With these people, the statue topplers, the ones who want to take down the murals of Columbus, what they are dealing in is fantasy, unreality that even a leftist biography will refute.
But to begin, read Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
It's a wonderful read.
It's kind of thick, but it's a wonderful journey.
It tells you a lot about him.
Alright, Lauren says, Michael, who is your favorite founding father and why?
My favorite is George Washington because he is peerless.
He is the best one.
He is, as George III, King George III is claimed, is said to have said of George Washington, he is the greatest man in the world.
He was just, there was no comparison.
Some people try to pick a favorite of, well, Hamilton was smarter or Adams was a better lawyer.
That's just because he has a Broadway play now.
That's right.
That's just because he's a rapper.
Yeah.
But Washington is on another level.
He is just in another echelon.
Of the people who are still down at Earth, probably John Adams.
He's up there with Alexander Hamilton.
Both of them were just terrific founding fathers.
Jefferson comes after those two guys.
I like Jefferson.
I don't mean to be too mean to Jefferson.
But really, you have to look first at Adams, Madison, Hamilton, maybe even throw Jay in there.
And then you get to Jefferson, who is also wonderful.
But the guys who wrote The Federalist, the second president of the United States, those were unbelievable, sophisticated thinkers who, through their genius, were able to keep us from turning the way of France.
And having what ultimately, what Edmund Burke might call a conservative revolution, rather than the Jacobin radicalism that destroyed France and nearly destroyed the entire European continent.
Can you believe that we're almost to the end?
No!
Thank God.
I've been blabbing for so long.
All right, Wesley has our final question for today.
She says her husband and her, she are big fans of your show, and they got to meet you in Dallas, you know, when you, like, ran out on stage.
Yeah.
I had to fly all around the country for a 60-second gag at the top of Ben's show.
But it was very fun, and I got to meet a lot of nice people.
So she says, thank you so much for your work.
And then she wants to know if the Jussie Smollett problem will lead to the mainstream media asking AOC serious questions about her dumb statements.
We saw Kamala Harris got asked a question, and then she pretended that she didn't tweet it or something.
Well, that was so sad.
I mean, in Kamala Harris' defense, maybe she didn't tweet it.
It was some communications director.
The look on her face, she was like...
At least Nancy Pelosi had the good sense to delete the tweet.
It never issued an apology.
No, the mainstream media won't ever ask a serious question of Ocasio-Cortez.
The only way that they ever would is if the darling of the socialist wing of the Democrats ever falls out of favor with her party more broadly.
But they'll never ask her a serious question because conservatives point out that she's a liar and a fraud and she doesn't know anything about anything and she's a radical who would destroy the country.
They'll never ask her a serious question.
They'll never apologize for the Jussie Smollett thing.
They will never apologize.
They'll find a way to present the two Nigerian men that Jussie Smollett allegedly paid to beat him up.
They will find a way to portray them as white men.
The way that they'll do it is they'll probably say that it was Ralph Northam and Mark Herring, governor and AG of Virginia, in the most elaborate blackface costume that has ever been worn in all of human history.
And then they'll say, as they already did, that the governor of Virginia, who's a Democrat, is secretly a Republican.
That is the way that they will cover it.
They won't apologize.
They never do.
This is why Rush Limbaugh calls them the drive-bys, is they wreak havoc, they spread total nonsense, fake news, outright lies and calumny and smears, and then they move on.
They're never held to account, and they won't hold any of their own AOC to account either.
All right.
It's a sad note to end on, but that's why you've got to come over here to places like us where we can break through that wall of the mainstream media.
And that's why you've got to tune in for next month's episode of The Conversation, because, you know, Ben is always super chipper and upbeat.
Thanks for joining us.
Maybe he's rubbing off on me.
Thanks for joining us, everyone.
And don't forget to subscribe to TheDailyWire.com now and join us for next month's episode of The Conversation featuring our very own editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire and the host of the fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
Fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation?
Ben Shapiro from the Ben Shapiro Show.
The fastest-talking conservative podcast in the nation, too.
Seriously.
And then also next week, backstage, it's going to be super-duper fun.
Lots of special things.
Be sure to tune in.
I'm Elisha Krause.
I'm Michael Knowles.
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