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March 14, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
42:11
Ep. 314 - Beto’s Rendezvous With Destiny

It’s official: Beto O’Rourke is running for president, baby! Then, are Democrats signaling a willingness to moderate? Republicans block President Trump’s emergency declaration, Gavin Newsom blocks the death penalty in California, and finally the Mailbag! Date: 03-14-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's official!
Beto O'Rourke is running for president, baby!
The definitely white, possibly straight, arguably male, failed senatorial candidate has brought a smile to the face of every fawning mainstream media reporter in the country.
The only question that remains is whether even one person outside of NBC headquarters actually cares.
Then, are Democrats signaling a willingness to moderate?
Possibly.
I'm not holding my breath, but there are some moves happening.
Republicans block President Trump's emergency declaration.
Gavin Newsom, governor of California, blocks the death penalty.
And finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The moment we were all waiting for.
Finally, finally, a completely unaccomplished congressman and failed senatorial candidate is running.
And he's really weird.
Yes, finally!
This is the bridge to the future.
We will get to his announcement.
We'll get to his strategy.
We'll get to the reaction.
We'll get to whether or not This signals that the Democrats are willing to moderate, but first, let's make a little money, honey, with Pro Talis.
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Finally, Beto O'Rourke is running for president.
We all knew he was going to do it.
He's been angling to do it ever since he failed to beat Ted Cruz for the Texas Senate race.
Then he went on his little weird adventure where he was posting these bizarre diary entries that was like a seventh grader reading Jack Kerouac or holding Caulfield or something.
It was not a good look.
Here, I'll just let you see it unvarnished, his announcement video.
Then we can react to how he looks, how he launches, and what his strategy is going to be for 2020.
Amy and I are happy to share with you that I'm running to serve you as the next president of the United States of America.
This is a defining moment of truth for this country and for every single one of us.
The challenges that we face right now, the interconnected crises in our economy, Our democracy and our climate have never been greater, and they will either consume us or they will afford us the greatest opportunity to unleash the genius of the United States of America.
In other words, this moment of peril produces perhaps the greatest moment of promise for this country and for everyone inside of it.
That's right.
That's why Beto is running.
Beto is running for president.
He's going to Throw his arms up in the air and he's going to do the monkey and I don't know what he's going to do.
It's a very awkward physicality that this man has.
I have to admit, I don't like him.
I'm going to admit that this is largely subconscious.
This is not a precisely rational dislike.
I don't think I've ever had a more viscerally negative reaction to a politician in my life than this guy.
Regardless of what they say, regardless of what they propose, just the way they look and move and talk...
I don't like him.
I don't trust him.
He is unctuous.
He is weak.
He looks like a little slick, that feminist man in college who's like the creepiest guy that you've ever seen.
That's Beto O'Rourke.
I don't understand.
I guess this is probably why the mainstream media like him so much.
But this is the problem.
Harvey Mansfield wrote this book on manliness, called Manliness, and he writes in that, that men just naturally...
Really don't like effeminate men.
And you can sort of come over this.
This is not to say gay men.
This is not to say even gender-confused men.
There's a difference between being effeminate as a man and wearing a dress.
I guess Beto O'Rourke does both, so that's a little confusing.
Because Beto O'Rourke, when he was in some rock band in his 20s, he would actually wear a dress.
But what I mean by effeminate is just his...
Just his mannerisms.
He's just so...
He's just so earnest.
He's just so saccharine.
He's just so scripted.
He's just so...
I'm just a nice guy.
Hey, come here.
Let's talk...
Your boyfriend sounds so mean.
Come here.
Let's talk about...
You know, I just...
This is the...
And by the way, this matters.
Because facts don't care about your feelings, but politics exclusively cares about your feelings.
So it doesn't really matter what he's proposing.
People are going to get a first impression.
People are going to react to him in this way.
And I don't think that any self-respecting man in the entire country could look at this guy and think this is a good candidate.
I just don't see it.
What is the campaign going to be?
If this 30 seconds is any indication, it's going to be saccharine, it's going to be scripted, and it's going to try to be centrist.
That's going to be Beto.
It's all...
This is the earnest.
This is why he's doing these crazy arm gestures.
He's trying to say, I'm really earnest.
Come on, guys.
Come on.
Let's get together, guys.
Come on.
It's so annoying.
Also, it's very scripted.
He's reading off the prompter for this, which is fine.
Reading off the prompter is no big deal, but he's reading off the prompter in what should be an impromptu announcement.
He's on his couch with his wife.
It's 2019, so in 2019...
Authenticity, impromptu, off-script is way better.
It just plays better.
HD video, it just plays better.
I mean, this is why Beto was live-streaming him getting his teeth cleaned a few months ago.
This is why AOC live-streams for cooking dinner.
No script.
It just seems more authentic.
This seems disingenuous.
He's trying to appeal to centrists.
So...
He's this kind of, I don't know, manufactured product.
He's just built by the mainstream media.
But he's trying to appeal to centrists.
He's trying to appeal to the extreme left.
He's trying to appeal...
To everybody, and it just doesn't seem quite genuine.
I mean, despite all of the glowing media coverage, Beto O'Rourke is making this claim that he is going to have a grassroots campaign.
And I invite you to join us in a kickoff for this campaign.
But even if you cannot be here on March 30th, I still want your help organizing where you live, bringing in friends and family and neighbors to the greatest grassroots campaign in The greatest grassroots campaign this country has ever seen was probably Trump 2016.
That was genuinely grassroots.
He had the entire party establishment, the entire conservative movement, capital C, capital M, and the entire media against him.
He had everybody against him.
It was only people who liked him.
That's what grassroots is.
He didn't raise any money from other people, really.
He was self-funded.
This is not grassroots.
I mean, the mainstream media have been fawning over this guy since he started running for Senate in Texas.
And he didn't even win.
And then they kept saying, well, if he doesn't win, he'll still win.
And Vanity Fair is this beautiful cover of him.
This is how the Today Show, the Today Show, not the new media, not a grassroots rally, this is how the Today Show on NBC breaks the news.
They're so excited.
Breaking news.
It's official.
The high profile Democrat announcing his presidential bid this morning.
The big name in the Democratic Party making his White House run official this morning.
So, what's with all the buzz behind Beto O'Rourke?
After months of hinting at a presidential run in 2020, former Democratic Congressman Beto O'Rourke Just made it official.
He is in.
Beto O'Rourke's announcement that he's entering the 2020 race will shake up the Democratic primary.
Beto O'Rourke making it official.
The former Texas congressman announcing he's running for president.
O'Rourke saying the interconnected crises of the economy, the climate and the nation's democracy have never been greater.
The latest hint O'Rourke was ready to run, coming in a glossy Vanity Fair spread overnight, captured by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.
O'Rourke saying, I'm just born to do this.
Grassroots.
Grassroots.
I don't know that one single person who is not in the mainstream media is excited that Beto O'Rourke is running, but all of the media are doing it.
I mean, Vanity Fair can be pretty brutal.
They did a profile on...
They've done a couple profiles on us, actually.
And they did one on all these people in politics and government and the media.
And all of them, all the Democrats have these beautiful photos.
And then they did a photo of Ben, which is...
I don't know how they even got this look.
Ben never has this look on his face, but it's not a good look.
They just used the worst possible photo they could find.
But then for Beto O'Rourke, oh, he's standing in Texas.
He's got his blue jeans, nice blue shirt.
He's casual, but he's not too casual.
He's ready to work.
I'm in it.
I was born for this.
This is the grassroots of Beto O'Rourke.
Now, Obviously that's ridiculous.
He's going to have to eventually appeal to voters.
How is he going to appeal to voters?
What we see from this video is that he's trying to position himself as a centrist.
Look, he's still got his...
Left-wing orthodoxy.
And he still talked about the climate.
He's still making this a key aspect of his campaign because it is not possible to run in this Democrat primary without talking about the climate.
The climate is the left-wing religion now.
The climate is, especially in a time when there are no real tangible issues, the economy is doing very well.
We have relative peace.
We have record high employment.
You can't talk about any tangible issue.
So it's the climate.
You're talking about essentially a religious issue for the left.
So he gets that in there, but he's trying to appeal to all Americans.
He's talking about farmers bringing everybody together.
He's talking about how we need to help the American worker, dignified work, all this sort of stuff.
He's so centrist in this video, he even mimics Ronald Reagan.
I think a lot of people didn't quite pick up on this, but he is paraphrasing Reagan very closely.
I want to leave you with this.
The only way for us to live up to the promise of America is to give it our all and to give it for all of us.
We are truly now, more than ever, the last great hope of Earth.
At this moment of maximum peril and maximum potential, let's show ourselves and those who will succeed us in this great country just who we are and what we can do.
Okay, so you hear this.
We're the last great hope of Earth.
We've got to show them.
So, from Ronald Reagan's probably most famous speech, A Time for Choosing, he is taking this line from Ronald Reagan, and he's changing it just a little bit.
Here's Reagan.
Winston Churchill said the destiny of man is not measured by material computations.
When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits, not animals.
And he said there's something going on in time and space and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
So, this is intentional, by the way.
I mean, this speech from Ronald Reagan is one of the most famous American political speeches ever.
That line is one of the most famous American political lines ever.
And Beto O'Rourke is using that.
He wants to have that Reagan-esque appeal.
But he changes it a little bit.
You hear Ronald Reagan says that the United States is the last best hope of man on Earth.
Of man on Earth.
What does Beto O'Rourke say?
He says, this is the last great hope of Earth.
It's a subtle distinction, but what Ronald Reagan is doing is putting man at the center of politics.
He's saying politics is about men.
This is a normal ordering of things.
He looks up to Providence, then we have politics, the affairs of men, and men have dominion and stewardship over the earth, over creation.
We need to be stewards for us.
What Beto O'Rourke does is flips it in the way that the environmentalist left flips it, where he says, we're the last hope of earth.
So it's the earth that we are serving, not the men on earth.
Not all the men who long for freedom behind the Iron Curtain.
Not all the men who long for a world order, who long for global peace and prosperity.
No, no.
The earth itself.
The rocks and the trees and the deer and the rabbits.
That is the environmentalist leftist aspect of it.
But it's that same Reagan...
It's sort of the difference between...
The traditional order of things, the order of things that tells us that we are not just animals, we're not just flesh, we are different than the animals, we have a spiritual dimension.
Ronald Reagan quotes Churchill, he says, when great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits, not animals.
What Beto O'Rourke is talking is in material terms.
It's just the earth, it's the dirt, it's the farmers, it's the this, it's just all material.
It's all stuff.
There's no spiritual component to it because the left lacks a spiritual component to it.
Now, he's running as Obama.
I mean, that's going to be the Beto move.
He's going to run as Obama and see if that can work a second time.
The trouble is, he's not Obama.
Barack Obama was much better, much more likable than Beto O'Rourke.
The trouble with Beto O'Rourke is that he actually is a beta male.
I'm saying that sort of to joke about him, but I mean that just as a pure observation.
He's not a manly man.
He wore dresses with a serious face in his 20s.
He's always dressing down.
He's always, I'm a sensitive guy.
Yeah.
And when he gets overly excited, he loses control of his emotions.
So his arm, instead of his arm sort of going this, you know, this, that, just as a matter of rhetoric and oratory, his arm goes like, he just loses control of himself.
He loses control of his voice, of the volume of his voice, of the tone of his voice, He just is a beta male.
I don't know how else to put it.
He's a wimp.
He's weak.
Barack Obama, at least in his campaigns, didn't come off that way.
Barack Obama did project a strength, a certain, there's no red America, there's no blue America, I love you back.
I mean, there was a real confidence to Barack Obama.
I mean, he would go limp-wristed when he was talking to dictators, but he actually, on the campaign trail, had a real confidence that Beto lacks.
Also, you can't just relive history.
You can't be...
I mean, this is what Republicans have sort of tried and failed to do for 30 years.
You can't just run as Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was very successful.
Ronald Reagan was the best Ronald Reagan ever, and Ronald Reagan was a cool guy.
You are not Ronald Reagan.
You can't run as him.
You can't relive his career.
You can't just have somebody else's career.
You have to be you.
All of the American presidents, certainly all of the notable ones, have been pretty original.
Donald Trump, certainly an American original.
Barack Obama, he's an American original.
Where else but in America could that man become president?
George W. Bush, a very different man from his father.
These guys, they're They have their distinct voice.
They have their distinct agenda.
Beto O'Rourke doesn't have that.
He's just a politician.
He's just a guy who was on the El Paso City Council or something.
Then he was in Congress where he accomplished basically nothing.
Then he tried to run for Senate and failed.
And then, this is the issue, he's running for president and he tells Vanity Fair, I want to be in it.
Man, I'm just born to be in it.
There's no draft Beto movement.
There was no draft Obama movement.
These were guys who didn't need any convincing.
They want to be in it.
This is a very stark distinction from the traditional...
No statesman who reluctantly goes and accepts power, who just is going to serve the people and then go back to his farm or something.
No, this is an ambitious guy who all he ever wanted was political power.
So when he says, I want to run to serve you, it just doesn't, you don't buy it.
Now, we see, I mean, the fact that he's running as a centrist tells us something about what the campaign is going to look like.
Because I guess he's running as a centrist now.
Right now, he actually said he came out and he said, quote, I'm a capitalist.
I don't see how we're going to meet any of the fundamental challenges that we have as a country without in part harnessing the power of the market.
So he says, I'm a capitalist on the one hand.
Then he's talking to a bunch of reporters and he says, I'm in favor of the Green New Deal.
I think we only have 12 years before the world is going to end.
So it's this bizarre, schizophrenic Democrat primary.
One minute they're super conservative.
I'm sorry, they're not super conservative at all.
One minute they're super left-wing, super radical.
The next minute they're trying to appear moderate and centrist.
But they're going to have to pick a side.
And the more you flip-flop back and forth, the tougher chance you're going to have of convincing the Voting public, that you're earnest, that you actually stand for something, that you're not just a cynical politician.
This raises the question, are the Democrats ultimately, by the end of 2020, going to moderate, or are they going to go all the way to the left?
Elizabeth Warren gives us a little hint into this, but I will say before we move on from Beto, I do want to make one side point.
His name's not Beto.
His name is Robert Francis O'Rourke.
If he entered this race as Robert O'Rourke or Bob O'Rourke, nobody would be talking about him.
He wouldn't get a Vanity Fair profile.
He wouldn't be touted on MSNBC. He wouldn't.
None of those things.
But because he adopted a Spanish name, because he's pretending to be a Hispanic, people love him, and they treat him as though he's Hispanic.
This is why words really matter.
This is why the sound of words matter.
You can look at the most Irish guy on the face of the earth, and you can hear that his name is Beto, and then you can say, alright, I guess he's the Mexican guy.
Wow, how inspiring.
So this has led me...
I'm not running for the Democrat nomination for president.
I have no intention of doing it, even though everyone else in the country is.
However, just in case I want to, I've decided from now on, I am requesting that everybody exclusively refer to me as Pedro.
Michael Pedro Knowles, or just Pedro, is what I would prefer.
Just look at me, all of this, Pedro.
No, people have been calling me Pedro for years.
That is the only way, as intersectional identity victim politics advances.
I think that's really the only way that we're going to be able to have a say in our politics.
So I'm just going to start it now.
If the whitest guy in America can pretend to be a Mexican, I think I can do it too.
Pedro Knowles, now in the future.
We're going to have to change the name of the show too.
Elizabeth Warren is showing us that possibly the Democrats want to moderate Nancy Pelosi, too.
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Elizabeth Warren, of all people, is coming back as the voice of reason and moderation in the Democrat Party.
I've seen it all, but between her, between Beto, between Nancy Pelosi, perhaps it is the case that AOC has peaked, socialism has peaked, And the establishmentarians are coming back to take back their party.
How do you explain where you are on the question of capitalism, socialism, and where do they marry each other?
So, look, I believe in markets.
I see the benefits that markets can produce.
I love the fact that there are a zillion people out there developing new apps or starting new businesses or trying a second line.
I think that's fabulous.
She thinks that's fabulous.
She loves markets.
She's a huge fan of markets.
What?
This woman was the furthest left voice in the Democrat Party not five, six years ago.
Now today, all of a sudden, she's become the conservative.
I mean, these are the two poles.
This is a fight for the soul of the Democrat Party.
I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms, the soul of the Democrat Party, but that's really what this is.
You've got AOC and Bernie Sanders talking about the virtues of bread lines.
Bernie Sanders actually said bread lines are a good thing, because then people get bread eventually, maybe.
And then you've got...
Elizabeth Warren, of all people, defending markets.
This is an important battle to be having.
It's sort of like the Iran-Iraq war in the sense that I hope they both lose.
I don't really care who wins this.
Because if the leftist crazies win, we're going to have a much easier time winning in the general election in 2020.
And if the centrists win, you've pushed off socialism through the main vessel of socialism in America, which is the Democrat Party, for at least a little while longer.
Who is going to win?
I highly suspect that the socialists are going to win.
I do.
I know there are a lot of polls out that show socialists are not very popular as presidential candidates or this or that.
I don't buy that.
Because you just are fighting this inevitable tide as generations, like millennials, become the majority of voters.
You're going to see that that generation, the majority of whom now identify with socialism, are going to be pushing for those candidates.
And especially when you have a polarizing president like Donald Trump, who fights back, who triggers the left, who just drives them so crazy...
They are going to demand a fighter on their side.
It's not going to be Liz Warren.
I mean, she is done.
The Indian heritage fraud has killed her campaign.
She is a dead woman walking.
But for the other people who are blowing in the wind, Kamala Harris, one day she's a socialist, the next day she's a capitalist.
Beto O'Rourke.
One day he calls himself a capitalist.
The next day he wants the Green New Deal to take over private industry and institute 80% taxes.
You're going to see the people who fight, the people who get a little more extreme are going to be the ones who have a bit of help.
These are the ones who are going to win actual grassroots support and not just fake Vanity Fair support.
You know, Vanity Fair, the mainstream media, always seem to pick the worst candidates.
They're always rooting for candidates who just don't win.
You've seen this in Republican and Democrat primaries.
I think that's what's going on with Beto.
I think he's a whole lot of nothing.
Certain polls put him at the top of the race, along with Biden and Bernie Sanders.
I think that's just a matter of name recognition.
I think as other candidates get more name recognition, you're going to see them beat them down.
You're going to see this even in the debates.
This smooth Obama-Beto, I think he's going to let his emotions run away with him in debates.
He's just not going to look strong enough.
I mean, probably the manliest candidate in the race right now is Amy Klobuchar, and I assume that if Beto starts going off on his wimpy tangents, his Holden Caulfield stuff, she's just going to pull the debate podium up and throw it at his head on the stage.
So, the question is, can he identify a campaign theme?
Stop playing the field.
Stop trying to be everything to everybody.
Stop trying to be a typical politician before it's too late.
Nancy Pelosi, same thing.
Nancy Pelosi came out the other day.
She said, I'm not for impeachment.
She said, this is news.
I'm going to give you some news right now because I haven't said this to any press person before since you asked.
I'm thinking about this.
Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path because it divides the country and he's just not worth it.
She's trying to moderate, too.
She's starting to think, hmm, maybe we shouldn't go down this socialism train.
Now, she has different incentives than the presidential candidates do.
She's in Congress.
Voters expect different things of these guys.
But is leading these two sides of the Democrat Party to a fight, to a brutal confrontation.
That confrontation is going to occur during the 2020 Democrat primary.
Get your popcorn.
It's going to be a blast.
We've got a lot more to get to.
got to get to the mailbag.
First, it's almost time for our next episode of The Conversation.
On Wednesday, March 20th at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, we're going to be changing things up with a live book signing of Ben's new book, The Right Side of History.
For this episode only, you get to ask Ben questions if you have purchased a copy of his book.
So what are you waiting for?
I read the book when it was still in draft form.
It's a very important book.
As far as all these popular books go about the culture, this is by far the most important one that's come out recently.
You got to check it out, so make sure to stay tuned.
Participate in Ben's live book signing Wednesday, March 20th at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 4 p.m.
Pacific on a special episode of The Conversation.
Go to dailywire.com.
$10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Walsh show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
Coming up, you get everything, and you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Mm-hmm.
Ooh, that's really good.
That's that South of the Border, El Paso, Beto edition.
Make sure you get yours before the Democrat 2020 primary drowns you.
We'll be right back with the mailbag in one second.
First question from Grant.
Dear Michael from the block, what is your opinion on a political science degree?
Many people seem to think that it's useless.
Yes, it is.
Ben was a poli-sci major.
He says the degree is totally useless.
And it is.
However, I would like to make this point.
The problem with a poli-sci degree is not that it is just professionally useless.
The liberal arts are supposed to be professionally useless.
That is the point of liberal arts.
They are not supposed to train you for any particular professional skill.
They are not supposed to get you a job.
That is explicitly not what the liberal arts are for.
And the liberal arts are still very, very important.
The liberal arts...
The word liberal is the key to the liberal arts.
The liberal arts exist to help us make sense of our freedom, to help us earn our freedom, to help us be free citizens.
When the liberal arts go away, free society goes away.
It's as simple as that.
It's how you learn about your civilization.
It's how you learn about the ideas that have shaped your civilization.
It's how you learn about politics, how you learn about philosophy, how you learn about culture, literature, mathematics, how you learn about God, the nature of metaphysics and divinity.
It is hugely important.
In the traditional academic structure, there were the liberal arts and the mechanical arts.
That's the difference.
Mechanical arts are professionally useful.
Liberal arts are to help you understand your freedom.
So the mechanical arts traditionally were tailoring or weaving, agriculture, farming, if you go to farm school, architecture, Warfare, the military training.
Trade, today we would call that a business degree.
Cooking and blacksmithing.
Those are mechanical arts.
Those are training for jobs.
The liberal arts, on the other hand, are grammar, logic, rhetoric.
That was called the trivium.
And then arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy.
That's the quadrivium.
The liberal arts as we talk about them now include a degree in English or a degree in history, as I have, or a degree in philosophy.
Those are the liberal arts.
Whenever somebody tells you that your liberal arts degree won't train you for a job, you should tell them, yes, of course it won't.
That's the purpose of liberal arts, is not to train you for a job.
Then you can go get a hard skill after you have gotten a liberal education to help you understand your freedom.
The problem with political science is that it doesn't today really fulfill...
The qualities of a liberal education.
Because if you were studying political philosophy, for instance, then, okay, you could have a sense of the great thinkers, the great ideas that have shaped your world.
Why you think what you think.
Why we do what we do.
What our past is, what our future is going to look like.
Unfortunately today, political science is often just a lot of statistics and some ideology mixed in and weak social science.
That doesn't really fulfill that.
So I think that's why it's particularly useless.
But if you studied history or philosophy or whatever, that is good.
That is a positive good.
It is essential to a free society that we have thriving liberal education for some people.
Not everybody needs a liberal education, just some people.
The evidence of this is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She graduated with a degree, with honors, in economics.
She went to a school that costs $70,000 a year to attend.
And she doesn't understand basic economic concepts.
What a bank does.
What a tax incentive is.
She doesn't understand any of that.
She's governing us.
She doesn't understand our freedom.
She doesn't know how to make sense of freedom and liberty.
So if we have a whole Congress full of AOCs, we're not going to have that liberty very long.
We're not going to have a free society very long.
Now, once you get that degree, once you have that liberal education, then you can go to law school, which is basically a trade school.
You can go to business school, a trade school, medical school, a trade school.
You can learn these hard skills to prepare you for jobs.
But I break with so many conservatives on this because I think so many conservatives get this totally wrong.
The liberal arts are essential.
Society is not just a bunch of automatons making widgets.
There is a dignified aspect to society, too.
That is civilization.
That is what gives us all the things that we really care about in this world, which are metaphysical.
Our freedom, our joys, our loves.
That's how we make sense of that.
If you lose that, you're going to have a very crude, rough, ugly society.
From Brett.
Dear Michael, lately I've been texting a Christian girl who went cold after we talked about LGBT marriage.
I said that while I don't recognize marriage outside of a man and a woman, the government should not be in the business of marriage and try to make it illegal.
She believes gay marriage should just be illegal.
Who is right?
Yours, Brett.
You're both wrong.
This is not a question of being legal or illegal.
The question is, what is marriage?
This is why the left gets us so wrong.
Either they misunderstand us or they're intentionally slandering us.
Because they say, you don't like gay people.
Because you don't want to redefine marriage.
What are you talking about?
The point that we're making is that marriage requires sexual difference.
For all of human history, Marriage has implied sexual difference.
If sexual difference does not matter to marriage, then what is marriage?
If marriage, which has always been the union of a husband and wives, at least one wife, sometimes more than one wife, If marriage is not that, and it loses the sense of creating family, it loses the sense of sexual and spiritual and emotional complementarity, if it loses the sense of a household, if it loses that sense, and it's just any loving association between people of any sex, then, I don't know, I love my friends, I love my male friends.
Is that not a marriage?
Well, you don't have sex.
Okay, well, people have sex with a lot of other people.
That's not marriage.
What makes marriage?
Now, I think what nice conservatives want to do is they want to say, well, I oppose gay marriage because it is a logical impossibility, but I have a lot of gay friends and I don't want them to think that I'm some sort of bigot, so let's just get the government out of it.
Do you want to get the government out of the definition of marriage?
Do you want to get the government out of the definition of taxes?
Do you want to get the government out of the definition of township?
The government has to recognize the meaning of words.
And marriage is the fundamental building block of society.
If the government is out of the business of the fundamental building block of society...
Then what does the government do?
What's the purpose of the government?
I mean, how does the government relate to society?
This is, I think, an essentially liberal argument, because what liberals and the left want us to do is to treat society as just a mass of random individuals, all atomized, they have no relation to one another, they're fundamentally isolated one from another, parent from child, husband from wife, cousin from cousin, friend from friend.
There's no relationships other than the individual and the government.
But that isn't true.
Free society exists when we recognize the family as the building block of society.
And then the relationship of families to other families.
The relationship among civic institutions, as Alexis de Tocqueville points out.
The relationship of the municipality to the state and the state to the federal government.
Those are ways to check the tyranny of one overpowerful government and a way for us to preserve our liberty and preserve our traditional society.
The government...
It has to be involved one way or the other, especially when it comes to who can adopt kids, looking over the welfare of kids, so on and so forth.
The government is going to have to be involved in some way, and we can either pretend that a word that has a very clear meaning doesn't have a meaning, or we can acknowledge reality and say, you don't need to be mean to gay people To acknowledge that marriage is marriage.
A toaster is a toaster.
A toaster is not a note card.
A cloud is not a Honda.
These words have meaning.
That's essentially the disagreement that you and your girlfriend are having.
But you should make it without any sort of animus.
You should just make it on a very clear-minded, logical plane.
From Taylor.
Michael, what is the protocol for when a woman attempts to open the door for a man in public?
Does one accept?
Does one refuse to enter until the door closes?
And can one open it for himself?
Thank you, Taylor.
Here is the protocol.
When you are walking up to a door, open the door, allow the woman to go in.
If you walk up to the door and the woman opens the door first and points to you, you point back to her and you say, oh please, after you.
If she at that point insists that you go first, then you go first.
Because a gentleman has to be gracious.
You want to be chivalrous.
You always want to give women the advantage.
You always want to give women a bit of grace.
But you have to be gracious yourself.
The purpose of a gentleman, his first role, is to put other people at ease.
And so you don't want to get into some match.
No, you go first.
No, you go first.
No, you.
You go first, then you close it, and then I'll open it again.
No.
You offer.
You are chivalrous.
And then, if she insists, you relent.
That's how you do it.
From Sean.
A game where the, a video game I guess, where the player is a rapist was, I think rightly, banned from Valve, a video game distributor.
How do we decide when to ban something like this?
Or do we allow it to be released and hope the market kills it?
Seems like a pretty terrible video game and it should be banned.
Absolutely.
Now it seems in this case the market killed it.
Because Valve is the market.
It's not the government.
Valve is going in there and saying, oh, this is going to be bad for business.
We're not going to allow this thing that's in terrible taste to go out to the public.
So the market worked in that respect.
Where it gets a little further down the line is, should the government be able to...
For instance, imprison particularly violent pornographers for obscenity.
I think the answer is obviously yes.
George W. Bush did this during his administration.
The government absolutely has a right, and really you have a right through your government, to ban obscenity.
Obscene things are not protected by some perfect free speech.
That is not what the First Amendment does.
That is not a way to have a particularly civilized society.
We've had laws against obscenity for a very long time in this country.
In a lot of places, you can't go out and strip naked and run around naked all over the streets.
Well, isn't that your free speech?
No, it's obscene.
It's creating a public nuisance.
And we can't only think of ourselves in this narrow ideological way.
Where the left goes so wrong is the left is so ideological.
But we cannot allow ourselves to become ideological and make an idol out of libertinism or of totally free markets without the government regulating them at all.
No, of course not.
What sort of society do we want to live in?
Are we, a people who are self-governing, going to allow ourselves to create and craft that society?
Certainly we should.
Traditionally in America we should.
And ideologues on either side shouldn't tell us that we can.
Okay, that's our show.
So much more to get to, but alas, we'll have to wait until Monday.
Have a good weekend.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Danny D'Amico.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production assistant Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
You know, conservatives are always saying conservatism is under attack, but I think it's liberalism that's under attack by the left.
Leftism has become the philosophy of racism, the philosophy of censorship, the philosophy of hate.
I'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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