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May 30, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:06
Ep. 356 - Mueller’s Campaign To Get Trump Impeached

Mueller launches a campaign to get Trump impeached, a maniac lights himself on fire outside the White House to protest President Trump, NY Magazine marvels that ugly guys want to look better to get laid, and conservatives are fighting with each other. Finally, the Mailbag! Date: 5-30-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Bob Mueller won't go away and Joe Biden can't be found.
We will analyze the former special counsel's campaign to get Congress to impeach Donald Trump.
Then we will try to locate the elusive 2020 presidential candidate.
A maniac lights himself on fire outside the White House to protest President Trump.
New York Magazine marvels that ugly guys want to look better to get laid.
And a conservative writer opens a massive debate, and very important debate, on what exactly we mean by conservatism.
Finally, The Mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
We have an inordinate amount of things to get to today.
Not the least of which is the former special counsel Bob Mueller basically teeing up a campaign for Congress to impeach Trump, totally showing his partisan cards, totally and finally showing he's not acting in good faith, even though a lot of us gave him the benefit of the doubt.
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All right, Bob Mueller.
I can't defend him at all anymore.
I tried to be fair.
I tried to be balanced.
I tried to say maybe he's not a partisan hack.
He is.
He showed his partisan cards.
It was unnecessary and unfortunate yesterday.
The former special counsel, before he finally left, he held a big press conference To try to frame President Trump as a sort of criminal, to try to frame what will happen now politically in Congress as the Congress considers impeachment.
Here is the key part of the press conference.
After that investigation, if we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.
We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.
The introduction to the volume two of our report explains that decision.
It explains that under long-standing department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office.
That is unconstitutional.
Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that too is prohibited.
The special counsel's office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy.
Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider.
The department's written opinion explaining the policy makes several important points.
That further informed our handling of the obstruction investigation.
What Mueller did here is so, so wrong.
It is so beyond the scope of his job.
It is so wrong to politicize the federal government in this way.
So what exactly did he do?
The key takeaway, the big line from this press conference is that Mueller is not, quote, confident that the president clearly did not commit a crime.
Since when has that been the standard of justice in this country?
Since when has that been the standard of innocence or guilt?
In this country, typically we would say that you are innocent until proven guilty.
Now, according to Bob Mueller, you are guilty until he is confident that you clearly did not commit a crime.
That's the implication here.
Bob Mueller is not confident that the president did not clearly commit a crime.
Okay, so did he commit a crime?
Well, no, no, we're not going to conclude that.
So you're not saying he committed a crime.
Right, I'm not saying he committed a crime.
So then you're saying there's no actionable evidence that he committed a crime.
Well, yeah, but I'm not confident that he didn't clearly commit a crime, that he clearly did not commit a crime.
What is this all about?
Now, his defense here, he comes on and says that under DOJ guidelines, he can't indict the president.
Okay.
So then why was he investigating this obstruction in the first place?
Why did he write 200 pages about obstruction in the first place?
And I know this is very confusing.
It's gone on for years now.
We hear about the Mueller investigation, the Russia, the collusion.
What was Bob Mueller tasked with doing in the first place?
The entire reason that Bob Mueller was appointed, the Is to determine the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Which he did, by the way.
He indicted a bunch of Russians.
He found certain companies in Russia that were working to shift the balance of the 2016 election.
Actually working for multiple candidates.
Or working, rather, to advance multiple candidates.
So his job was to identify Russian interference.
He says explicitly he is not allowed to indict a sitting president.
So if he's not allowed to do that, then he's not going to conclude that a president committed a crime, so then really he shouldn't have been investigating this in the first place.
He overstepped the bounds of his office.
Why did he investigate obstruction if he couldn't do anything with it?
He investigated obstruction because he hates Donald Trump and he really wishes that Donald Trump didn't win in 2016 and he wants to do the work of congressional Democrats for them to help them impeach him.
What else could it have been?
What else could he have been doing?
He can't take any action, even if he did find sufficient evidence of the crime of collusion.
Which, by the way, the Attorney General William Barr and the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein did not find evidence of obstruction.
They did not find sufficient evidence of obstruction to act.
So, even on that front, they declared, the DOJ declared, there wasn't sufficient evidence.
Now, what really happened here?
Mueller punted on the question of obstruction.
Then, the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General came to the conclusion, as was their job, And the conclusion they came to was that there was not sufficient evidence of obstruction.
Some people are saying, well, why didn't they leave the question open?
Because the Department of Justice is not a freshman seminar at a college in the middle of America.
The purpose of the Department of Justice is not to foster intellectual debate and engage in hypotheticals and just leave questions out there and you can form your own conclusions.
The Department of Justice is the Department of Justice.
It is there to prosecute.
It is there to effect justice.
You don't get to just leave academic questions hanging in the air.
You have to come to a conclusion.
So they came to the conclusion and Bob Mueller is really upset that the report that he gave out did not have the political effect that he obviously wanted, which was to hurt the president.
So then what did he do?
He wrote a letter.
He wrote an angry letter to William Barr saying, you misrepresented what my report said.
So Barr called him.
He said, Bob, why the fancy letter?
If you had a problem, why not just call me?
What was your problem?
Because what Mueller was saying is that Barr misrepresented what Mueller said in the report.
Well, the report's out there.
You can read the report yourself.
I've read the report.
Many other people have read the report.
What did the report say?
Did Barr misrepresent it?
No.
In that first letter, you'll remember, when the Mueller report came in, William Barr clearly said that Mueller did not exonerate Trump on obstruction one way or the other.
He did not come to a conclusion one way or the other.
There was no new information in this press conference.
This press conference, the only headline, the only thing that Mueller was trying to say is that if I was fully convinced that President Trump did not commit the crime of obstruction, I would have said so.
Right.
You said that in the report.
We all read it.
Not only did you say it in the report weeks ago, William Barr quoted you as saying that in his first letter on the subject weeks ago.
There was no news.
Bob Mueller is just angry and petulant because the report didn't begin the end of the Trump administration, and so he's trying to egg Congress along to impeach him.
President Trump, for his part, responded in a typically Trumpian way.
He made some great points, and then he made some what seemed to be very unhelpful points on an impromptu press conference.
I think he's totally conflicted because, as you know, he wanted to be the FBI director, and I said no.
As you know, I had a business dispute with him.
After he left the FBI, we had a business dispute.
Not a nice one.
He wasn't happy with what I did.
And I don't blame him, but I had to do it because that was the right thing to do.
But I had a business dispute.
And he loves Comey.
You look at the relationship that those two, so whether it's love or a deep like, but he should — he was conflicted.
Look, Robert Mueller should have never been chosen.
Because he wanted the FBI job, and he didn't get it.
And the next day, he was picked as special counsel.
So you tell somebody, I'm sorry, you can't have the job.
And then after you say that, he's going to make a ruling on you.
It doesn't work that way.
Plus, we had a business dispute.
Plus, his relationship with Comey was extraordinary.
So what is President Trump doing here?
He is reaching into a pot on the stove and he is pulling out a big handful of spaghetti and he is throwing it at the wall.
He's giving a bunch of facts about Robert Mueller that apparently have no bearing on the question, but he's just doing it to create the sense that Mueller was always compromised, which by the way is true, just not for the reasons that So President Trump says that Mueller wanted the FBI director job.
Maybe he did.
He did meet with President Trump, so it's very possible that he did.
He then says that's the reason why he shouldn't have been appointed.
I don't know about that.
Then he says they were in a business dispute.
I don't know the nature of the business dispute, but okay, well, what does that mean?
Then he says he really likes James Comey.
It does appear that he had a very good relationship with James Comey.
Okay, fine.
But he's throwing all these things out there.
Which one is it that actually shows...
Why Bob Mueller was unfit for this job.
He eventually comes to the point after throwing the spaghetti at the ball.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So President Trump throws spaghetti at the wall because of, because, legitimately because of this outrageous press conference from Bob Mueller.
Then he comes to the better point in his response eventually.
I think he is a total conflicted person.
I think Mueller is a true never-Trumper.
He's somebody that dislikes Donald Trump.
He's somebody that didn't get a job that he requested that he wanted very badly.
And then he was appointed.
And despite that, and despite $40 million, 18 Trump haters, including people that work for Hillary Clinton and some of the worst human beings on earth, they got nothing.
It's pretty amazing.
This is it.
I love that he calls them some of the worst human beings on earth.
Fair enough, you know.
That's the real point.
Bob Mueller, in his actions, appears to be a committed never-Trumper.
Not a guy who had issues with Trump, maybe he voted for, maybe he didn't, but you know, okay, he moves on.
This is a guy who staffed his investigation with people committed to overturning the 2016 election, with people where we found their text messages and they say, we're going to cheat, we're going to use the power of the state, we are going to rig everything to stop Trump from being elected president.
That is the problem.
That is why he was compromised.
That's why this investigation was compromised.
We have tried to be fair to him.
We have tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.
This press conference, I think, totally blew that out of the water.
And I'm not alone in thinking this.
Some of the greatest legal minds in the country agree with this.
Not just committed Republicans, but people who have been lifelong Democrats, lifelong civil libertarians, guys like our friend Alan Dershowitz.
Alan Dershowitz wrote out, quote, until today, I've defended Mueller against the accusations that he's a partisan.
I did not believe that he personally favored either the Democrats or the Republicans or had a point of view on whether President Trump should be impeached.
But I have now changed my mind by putting his thumb, indeed his elbow, on the scale of justice in favor of impeachment based on obstruction of justice.
Mueller has revealed his partisan bias.
He has distorted the critical role of a prosecutor in our justice system.
Exactly right.
People all the time complain about Donald Trump undermining our institutions, our political process.
No.
People who staff absurd investigations with committed never-Trumpers and committed partisans who brag about using the levers of power in the federal government to overturn a presidential election.
Those are the guys undermining our institutions.
Those are the guys who are undermining our political processes.
Much more so and much more egregiously with Donald Trump.
At least...
Donald Trump, when he exaggerates, when he says things that aren't true, when he boasts, when he brags, when he goes all the way out there, at least you know what you're getting.
At least he's sort of honest about it.
But these guys, Robert Mueller, unimpeachable, the most serious, respectable man in the country, he wears his tie all nice.
He has a very serious face.
He has worked in the federal government his whole life.
And then he staffs his entire investigation with partisans and people who are committed to overturning the election.
And then when he doesn't get his political way, he hosts an outrageous press conference that just reiterates his points and eggs on Congress to impeach.
That's the problem.
Because he's not honest about it.
He's not honest about his goals.
Same thing with the people that he staffed.
Same thing with the people egging him on.
That's the real problem.
After this press conference, it's very hard to conclude that Bob Mueller has been acting in good faith.
Now, you would say, why did he hold the press conference?
Maybe he did it as a last word because he doesn't want to testify before Congress because he doesn't want to inject himself into politics.
If that were true, he could have just written another letter.
If that were true, if what he said there is true, this is my final statement, and my Mueller report is my testimony.
If that were true, he could have written that in a letter.
He could have texted it.
He could have done anything other than hold this press conference and all but beg Congress to impeach.
Maybe he thinks William Barr misrepresented his findings.
Well, except that Mueller didn't say anything in that press conference that Barr didn't write in his report about the report.
He's campaigning to get Congress to impeach.
He's politicizing what is supposed to be the least political office in the federal government, and it's too bad.
At least one man, though, was even less in control of his emotions than Bob Mueller was yesterday.
For those watching, this is a little hard to watch.
A man set himself on fire outside the White House to protest President Trump.
Dude, what the f***?
That's not a stunt.
Where are the police?
Dude, that's not a f***ing stunt.
This guy's killing me.
He's burned himself alive.
What the f***?
It's the police.
No, he doesn't.
Stop.
Get your head out of your f***.
I don't understand why you guys want to be the stupidest thing.
Why are you being a f***er?
Get back.
He's going f***ing here.
What the f...
First responders extinguished him.
They took him to the hospital.
Very sadly, the man died.
The reason I bring it up at all is because of the reaction to it.
There were a lot of people on Twitter calling him brave, saying this is so brave.
This is wow.
Look at this brave and courageous man setting himself.
There's nothing brave about this.
This is mental illness.
What you're looking at is mental illness.
33-year-old Arnav Gupta is from Bethesda, Maryland.
He had been reported missing earlier in the day by his family, who said that they were concerned for his physical and emotional welfare.
He then went out, lit himself on fire, and killed himself.
He committed suicide.
And some people are calling him brave for this.
This is mental illness.
No one should call it brave.
I'm certain the guy had underlying madness, and I'm certain that that madness was exacerbated by hysteria about the president, by hysteria that the president is a fascist, murderer, genocidal, racist, stooge of Russia.
He's destroying the whole world because of That hysteria, it would appear that his mental illness got worse.
I'm not blaming the media outlets that fanned the flames of that hysteria and the political activists who fanned the flames of that hysteria.
I'm not blaming them for his death.
But it is undeniably, it seems, the case that that climate, that hysteria, contributed to this mental illness tremendously.
Which should raise questions for us about how we discuss this president.
You can be vigorously critical, absolutely, but some of the excesses that we've seen for two years seem to be just that.
They seem to be excessive.
However, what people do have responsibility for is their reaction to this.
There's nothing brave about what he did.
There's nothing courageous about what he did.
There's nothing to be encouraged about what he did.
It's mental illness.
We should pray for the guy.
We should pray for his family.
It's awful.
And we should, hopefully, in all the smoke of this guy going up in flames, we should try to see politics with a little clarity and blow away the fogs of hysteria.
Speaking of clarity and hysteria, there is a major news story in New York Magazine about incels.
I don't know if you've heard about incels.
Incels are the involuntarily celibate.
It's a phrase referring to guys who are ugly and they can't get laid, and as a result, they hate women.
And now this story is that they are getting plastic surgery to make themselves look better.
So the opposite of an incel in this culture is a chad.
That's their word for guys who look good.
It's chads.
And New York Magazine has this headline, How many bones would you break to get laid?
The article begins, Although it's impossible to know who was posting on multiple accounts.
Incels called women like the one Truth For Lie had hired Stacey's.
Alpha men had a name too.
They were called Chad's.
So this is this culture they're describing.
Pretty bizarre culture, obviously.
But I just want to point out this headline.
How many bones would you break to get laid?
New York Magazine is just viciously mocking these guys, even in the headline, because they're getting plastic surgery to look better.
Okay.
Perfectly fair to criticize people who get cosmetic surgery just to look a little bit nicer.
Would you use that same headline to talk about a girl who gets a nose job?
I don't remember New York Magazine saying, how many bones would you break to get laid, ladies?
These desperate women with big noses are getting nose jobs.
And breast augmentation.
What a bunch of weird losers.
That's a little bit of a double standard here.
Now, obviously, these incel guys are lunatics as well, and they should...
Shake out of it.
They go on.
The article writes, you know those guys who are, quote, praised day and night for their top-tier genetics, making a boatload, I'll change the word, of money, getting insane amounts of validation, never having to worry about paying the rent or any of that BS. All they think about is their next football match and coming home and having a threesome with two supermodels, supermodels that puke at the thought of them touching you.
That's how one incel with a Pepe Frog as his avatar described Chad's.
So, obviously, a lot of this culture, I think, is trolling.
Like everything on the internet, it's trolling.
They're exaggerating.
They're using these kind of terms in an ironic way.
They're using memes in an ironic way.
I suspect they're even using misogyny in an ironic way lots of the time.
However, if you live in irony, if you are being ironic all of the time, then there's no such thing as irony.
That's just what you're doing.
If you troll all of the time, That's just who you are.
You just have become the troll.
You have become Pepe the Frog.
And the issue here too...
With incel culture is the same poison that is affecting all of the culture, which is materialism, which is that we are just our bodies, that our physical features are, that's all that we are, that's all that make us up, and therefore we can hopefully try to change them forever and make them better.
Now, what these guys seem to miss, they say, if you're ugly, you're not ever going to have sex with a woman.
I personally know ugly rich guys who sleep with beautiful women all the time.
I don't know why.
There's something very physically attractive about a wad of cash in somebody's pocket.
People who are very successful, people who have good careers, people who get famous, even if they're ugly, even if they're not that rich.
There are other shallow attributes that also attract women.
So I think the premise of incel culture, that if you're ugly, you're never going to sleep with a woman, that premise is demonstrably false.
And the bigger problem and the topic of this essay is a major problem in our culture.
The idea that we are just our physical bodies.
And further, the idea that we can just endlessly change ourselves, endlessly augment our physicality, and that will somehow make us feel better, that will somehow make us have a better life.
This is the same logic of transgenderism.
It's exactly the same logic.
It's the same logic that tells us that we can not only define ourselves, we can thereby define reality by chopping off this part of us or changing this part or breaking this bone.
And that is not true.
And this actually ties in to a major political story on the right today, which is a big debate that has broken out between traditionalist conservatives and more classically liberal conservatives.
Can you take liberty to its logical conclusion forever and redefine everything and just maximize individual autonomy?
Or is there something that restrains us, something that holds us back?
Morality, religion, culture.
We'll get to that in a second, but first, plus we'll get to the mailbag first.
First, you've got to go to dailywire.com.
You get everything.
You get the whole Daily Wire crew.
Me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Another Kingdom, questions in the mailbag, questions backstage, and the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
But you've got to go to dailywire.com.
Be right back.
back.
We got a lot more.
All right.
Before we get to the mailbag, before we get to questions of the rift in the conservative movement, we have got to find out where Joe Biden is.
Has anybody seen Joe Biden?
Has Joe Biden, should we file a missing persons report for Joe Biden?
He didn't participate in any Memorial Day ceremonies on Monday.
This is one of the biggest campaign events of the campaign season, going to a Memorial Day ceremony.
Pete and Bernie were in New Hampshire.
Amy Klobuchar was in Minneapolis.
Elizabeth Warren was in Iowa.
Kamala did a video on Memorial Day.
Biden nowhere to be found.
Why not?
Because Joe Biden thinks he's going to get the nomination by default.
Joe Biden thinks he's pulling way ahead of everybody.
15 points ahead of Bernie.
He's 30 points ahead of other competitors.
He's killing it in the race right now.
So he says, the best way that I can maintain that lead is by pulling back.
Is by not showing myself.
Why?
Because Joe Biden is the most gaffe-prone politician in the entire country.
So for Joe Biden, being in public is a liability.
For most politicians, being in public is helpful.
When Pete Buttigieg goes on TV, people like him more.
He gets more name recognition.
He does better.
For Joe Biden, people like him the most that they will ever like him right now.
When he opens his mouth, when he talks, when he acts in public, people like him less.
So he's trying to hide.
This is very difficult for him.
I can't remember anyone who just got the nomination by playing it really safe and hiding out.
Which president did that happen to?
Obviously not Donald Trump.
Obviously not Barack Obama.
Certainly not George W. Bush.
Not Bill Clinton.
This doesn't work.
You've got to go for it.
You've got to grab hold of something.
You have to offer people something.
If you are the liability, how do you expect to get the nomination?
I know that Joe Biden has a big lead right now.
We haven't even had the first debate.
He's gonna have to open his mouth eventually.
Better to go on the offense.
Better to define yourself.
And if you being in public is the big liability, presidents have to be in public.
Presidential candidates need to be in public a lot.
That's probably not going to work out very well for him.
We have an enormous debate opening up on the right between traditional conservatives, social conservatives, I guess you would say, and classical liberals, the people who believe that the most important thing, the main thing that matters is individual liberty, maximizing individual the main thing that matters is individual liberty, maximizing individual liberty.
Unfortunately, we don't have time to get to it today, so we're going to have to get to that tomorrow, tune back, and we will discuss it because it's a very important debate and people are taking very strong sides and we'll try to analyze what it really means.
Today, however, we don't have time for that because we have to get to the mailbag.
So, let's get to it.
Let's get through as many as we can.
From Michael.
Great name.
Hello, Michael.
I, too, am a fellow Michael.
What are your thoughts about men wearing earrings in professional settings?
I appreciate your thoughts.
If you are a rock musician or a pirate, you can wear earrings in a professional setting.
If you are a man in any other profession, you cannot wear an earring.
In the office or anywhere else.
From Michael, also Michael.
Hi, Michael.
I'm wondering about your thoughts on why most of the prominent Democrats happen to be baby boomers.
Does this bode well for the Democratic Party?
No, that doesn't bode well at all for them.
I have noticed this.
Obviously, Joe Biden is leading the pack right now.
Bernie Sanders is right after him.
Hillary Clinton is probably the most prominent Democrat in the country.
They're boomers.
That's true.
And I think the reason why boomers are trending Democratic is because...
The Democratic Party is embracing past ideas, old ideas, ideas that have been rejected.
The baby boomers were the hippies, right?
They grew up, they sort of became the hippies, and they broke down so many cultural institutions.
I know it's nostalgic to look back and say, oh, the past used to be better and now it's much worse.
Something really did change in the late 1960s and 70s and then up through the 80s.
something really fundamentally cracked in the culture.
And this had a lot to do with the rise of second wave feminism, had a lot to do with the sexual revolution, had a lot to do with the cultural revolutions that happened not just in the US but all around the world.
And what it led to was an acceleration away from traditional culture.
So you saw on university campuses hollowing out of the curriculum saying, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go," as they marched through the campuses.
Sitting in, shutting down classrooms.
It was the left's long march through the institutions.
Hollywood basically falls apart in the 1960s and 1970s.
All the great old movies, gone.
Now movies have an explicitly leftist political agenda and almost a uniformly leftist political agenda.
It's all just about deconstruction.
Breaking down.
That's what has defined the baby boomers.
That is what now defines the Democratic Party.
And so even young Democrats have embraced these sorts of ideologies.
I think that's why you see it there.
And the alternative is the opposite of destruction.
It's conservatism.
And it's building things back up.
And it's hearkening back to our traditions.
Our political, cultural, and religious traditions.
Hope that answers it.
From Michael.
Another Michael.
Goodness gracious.
Hello, Michael.
I have recently had an argument thrown at me against abortion that I wonder how you would respond to.
The person said that they don't like guns but don't want our right to them taken away.
I'm curious how you would respond to this argument, sincerely Michael.
The idea being, I don't like guns, but I don't want people's political right to a gun taken away.
Therefore, I don't like abortion, but I also don't want people's political right to an abortion taken away.
So the difference here, the most basic difference, is that there is a constitutional right to a gun.
You have the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms.
There is no constitutional right to an abortion.
Even the Supreme Court jurists who invented that right in Roe v.
Wade more or less admitted that it wasn't in the Constitution.
They said, well, maybe you can find it in part in the Ninth Amendment or maybe you can find it in the 14th.
It doesn't really matter.
Now there's a right to an abortion.
So there is no right.
It would be one reason.
The other reason is that guns exist to protect life.
The purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect your life, your life, your family's life, and your liberty against tyranny.
The purpose of abortion is to end life.
It's to kill life.
So it's a mother killing her child or an abortion doctor killing a mother's child.
The other aspect here is, if you're arguing from, say, natural rights, which people do in America a lot, you've got life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So we protect our liberty, of course.
Life comes first, because without life you can't have liberty.
Without liberty you can't have the pursuit of happiness or the pursuit of property.
I've never heard that argument before that you bring up.
I don't think it has any merit at all, and I think there are a number of ways that you can answer it pretty succinctly.
From Joshua, would you say that there is a correlation between not knowing American laws and rights with leaning politically to the left?
Absolutely.
That is absolutely the case.
And you see it not just on a micro level, so individuals who are less aware of our Constitution and our laws and our history lean more left, although they do.
You also see this on a social level.
So in recent decades, people's knowledge of American history, American civics, American government, has dramatically decreased.
Most Americans can't name all three branches of government.
Most people can't identify what the First Amendment does.
And as that has happened, the country has moved to the left.
Even though conservatives and Republicans win some elections here or there, the country and the culture overall has moved to the left.
A country cannot be stupid and remain free.
A country cannot be ignorant and remain free.
And so what the left has done is hollowed out education and hollowed out our own civics.
And even in our history departments, turned our history against us, rewritten certain aspects of history, deleted whole swaths of history, taken away context from history.
And so people graduate ignorant and they become more susceptible to ideologies that are fundamentally un-American.
From Cole.
Hey, Michael.
My girlfriend is worried my traditional values will rob her of her autonomy.
She holds similar values to me, but we were both raised in San Francisco.
So our conservative values have marked us out like black sheep amidst friends.
How do I counter the leftist narrative that I am a chauvinist or a misogynist?
How do I show I still unequivocally consider my girlfriend equal?
Well, the first way is...
You probably have a better relationship with your girlfriend than most of these lefty friends.
That's just going to be my guess.
So the best way to show it is to just have a great relationship.
And it is certainly the case I have seen it practically.
Personally, I've seen it anecdotally with friends.
And statistics socially bear it out.
People who are in traditional romantic relationships are much happier.
They're much better off.
The New York Times had to admit this the other day.
The happiest wife in America, the happiest category of wife are religious conservative wives.
Not religious liberals, not irreligious conservatives, the traditional types.
And specifically traditional conservatives are the happiest wives.
That is one way to do it.
The other way is to show that actually feminism is pretty anti-woman and traditional gender roles are pretty pro-woman.
What do I mean by that?
Feminism tells women that the only way that they can be good and valuable and worthwhile is to act more like men.
Dress like men, go to the same jobs that men go to, engage in the same sort of sexual behavior that men engage in, take the same attitude towards sex that men do.
Just be like men.
They're saying femininity is valueless, worthless, but masculinity is very valuable and so women need to be like men.
That's what feminism says.
What traditional gender roles teach is that men and women are spiritually equal even though they are different and distinct.
The most obvious example of this is Adam and Eve.
Eve comes from Adam's rib.
God reaches into Adam, pulls out his rib, and creates Eve.
This does not make Eve subservient to Adam.
This does not make Eve lesser than Adam.
If God had pulled out part of Adam's hair from the top of Adam's body, that would make Eve better than Adam.
If God had pulled Eve from his big toe, that would make Eve less than Adam.
He pulls Eve, rather, he pulls her, right from the center of Adam.
That is to say, right in the middle, his rib.
Woman is spiritually equal to man.
Albeit different and in different ways.
That's the traditional view.
I suspect that's the view you're talking about.
That is the far more defensible view of the genders than modern feminism, which is the most anti-woman theory that we've yet devised.
From Ken...
I have many friends who base their decisions off of emotions rather than logical reasoning.
How does one combat this without getting emotional himself?
I talk to left-wingers all the time.
I very rarely become emotional because I'm confident in my views and I can defend my views and they can't defend their views.
People get emotional in political discussion when they feel that they're wrong.
They get emotional in political discussion when they can't quite defend what they're saying.
So they get really worked up and they shriek and they yell and they scream no and they wear the pink hats and they do all of that.
When you're confident about what you think, you just explain to them why they're wrong.
They say, well, what about this?
And you say, oh, good point, but this is why that's wrong.
Well, but what about this?
Okay, fine, good point, but this is why that's wrong.
So I rarely get worked up.
What's the point of getting worked up emotionally?
You can be passionate about what you believe.
You can be firm about what you believe.
But that's how I would deal with it.
The crazier they get, the cooler that you would be.
Because possibly you could convince them, but what you do 99% of the time is you just make them look like complete lunatics and you look like the sane guy.
And that helps us win.
Helps us win the culture and it helps us win elections.
From Daniel.
Hi Michael, I'd like to know why the mothers and fathers aren't liable for getting an abortion.
My gut tells me they shouldn't be criminally liable.
Only the doctors should be.
But what's a good argument for this?
Thanks, Daniel.
I agree with that.
I don't think that mothers who procure abortions should be punished, even though I do think that doctors who perform abortions should be punished.
Why?
Because this legal system has told women now for 50 years that they have a constitutional right to get an abortion.
Women have been told for over a generation that they have a legal constitutional right to get an abortion.
They don't, but that's still pretty confusing.
The culture has told them that they have a right to get an abortion, that abortion is not only okay, but that it's a good thing, that you should shout it from the rooftop.
How wonderful that you can shout your abortion.
And on a personal level, Women get abortions for a variety of reasons.
One of them is intense pressure.
Pressure from their boyfriend or the guy who got him into trouble.
Pressure from the culture.
Pressure maybe from their parents.
Pressure from their schools.
They have a lot of pressure to go and kill that baby and they've got a lot of rationalizations for why it's not really killing a baby and it's a really awful thing.
I was at Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia at that rally that Matt Walsh put together.
I saw a woman walk into Planned Parenthood.
She didn't look happy.
She wasn't skipping down the street.
She didn't seem excited to go kill her child.
She seemed distressed, as well she should be, because somewhere deep down her conscience was telling her that she shouldn't kill her baby.
But she was distressed.
Women are victims of abortion as well.
They live with lifelong regret.
I know multiple people who have had abortions.
Friends of mine.
The ones that we've talked about it, they have immense regret.
Jane Roe, the woman who was in the case Roe versus Wade, had immense regret.
She actually didn't have an abortion.
She actually had her child.
But immense regret.
Carried this guilt with her the rest of her life.
That she was part of killing all of these babies.
Because we know ultimately what it is.
It's killing a baby.
So I think that conservatives, while eager for justice in the case of abortion and eager to prevent the deaths of a million babies a year, also, much more than the left, understand human frailty and understand the complexity of the world.
And so if we can stop abortion by Through the mechanisms of the law, as we should, and punish the people who are removed, who don't have that pressure, who don't face all of those issues, doctors who should know better, who took a Hippocratic oath not to harm people, first do no harm.
If we can do it that way, I think that's the wiser way to do it, and ultimately a just way to do it.
From Kendall.
Hey Michael, can you weigh in on the argument going on between the more Catholic than Knowles and Matt Walsh combined So Rob Amari and Mr.
Ivory Tower David French?
It's funny that that question's in there because that is a story that I wanted to get to today and will have to get to tomorrow.
The debate...
Between So Rob and David French is a debate that has been bubbling among conservatives for 20 years at a very high level and has really been there the whole time.
It's the debate between conservatism Traditionalism, social conservatism, whatever you want to call it, and classical liberalism, or people who trend toward libertarianism, or people who say, hey, hands off, it doesn't matter, everything's neutral, we want pluralism, we want all...
That's the debate that's happening.
The reason the debate is happening now is because both sides came together For 50 years, 40 years I guess, from William F. Buckley Jr.
bringing all of these sides together, the conservative movement after World War II, to fight together against communism, to fight together against the Soviet Union.
So you had the conservatives who were mostly upset about atheism in communism, and you had the classical liberals who were mostly upset about the collectivism of communism, and they came together because they had a common enemy.
And then after we vanquished that enemy of communism, the two sides broke apart again because they had profound divisions.
That's the debate that's being had right now.
If I had to choose between the traditionalism of Saurabh Amari and the liberalism, classical liberalism of David French, I would choose the traditionalism of Saurabh.
But the question is complicated, and we will get to that, I guess, tomorrow.
How's that for a cliffhanger?
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Show.
I'll see you then.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
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Once again, an investigator opens his fat mouth hoping to take a shot at Donald Trump, and instead, he blows up the Democrats.
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