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June 27, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:24
Ep. 373 - Los Democrats Son Muy Estúpidos

Democrats kicked off last night’s presidential primary debate with a novel strategy: randomly speaking in Spanish. Then, my pal Jamil Jivani stops by to discuss how young men get radicalized, and finally the Mailbag! Date: 06-27-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hola, mamacitas!
Democrats kicked off last night's presidential primary debate with a novel strategy.
They started randomly speaking in Spanish throughout the whole thing.
We will examine how los Democrats got so muy estúpidos.
Then, my pal Jamil Giovanni stops by to discuss how young men get radicalized.
And finally, the mailbag.
Yo soy Michael Knowles, y thiso iso el Michael Knowles Show-o.
Yo quiero Taco Bell.
That's basically my main takeaway from last night's Democratic debate, is that yo quiero Taco Bell.
So the debate was broadcast on NBC, and I'm sitting there with sweet little Lisa, we're watching it, and I thought I may have been watching it on Telemundo, because for some reason, these candidates all seem to be speaking in Spanish.
Here's a little taste.
I'm Julian Castro, and I'm postulating as President of the United States.
We need to include each person in the success of this economy.
Pero si queremos hacer eso, necesitamos incluir cada persona en nuestra democracia.
Cada votante necesitamos la representación y cada voz necesitamos escuchar.
La situación ahora es inacceptable.
Este presidente ha atacado, ha demonetado a los inmigrantes.
Es inacceptable y voy a cambiar el resto.
So, if you couldn't see that, there's this moment when Beto, he's the first one, first question, Beto starts speaking in Spanish randomly for no reason, and there's a cutaway, and you see Cory Booker looking at him like, dude, are you actually pandering more than I am?
Are you actually being more disingenuous than I, Cory Booker, am being?
And it was probably the only genuine thing I've ever seen out of Cory Booker.
And then within, I don't know, 10 minutes or something, Cory Booker starts doing it too.
It was this moment of, like, Beto saying...
Hey, hey, bro, nobody can butcher the Spanish language better than I can.
And then Booker's there like, hold my pupusa!
And then he just starts speaking in broken Spanish.
It was very hilarious to watch.
But it wasn't just the candidates.
Even the moderator got in on all the Spanish fun.
Congressista O'Rourke, what would you do, Congressman, day one at the White House?
We're going to treat each person with respect and dignity they deserve as humans.
Oh, Beto O'Rourke's like the guy who got called on by a teacher, but he didn't do the homework.
So he's pretending to speak Spanish from the first question.
Then this moderator, Jose Diaz-Balart, just starts speaking to him in Spanish, and Beto O'Rourke basically just responds, ¿Dónde está?
La biblioteca.
Donde?
So he uses the word, I wasn't listening to all the Spanish, because I don't speak Spanish, and I've never been more happy that I don't speak Spanish than when I was watching last night's debate.
But halfway through, he doesn't remember the word for medicine, which I believe is medicina.
So he's just like, oh yeah, si, yo quiero la medicina.
Yeah.
And it's just really, really pathetic.
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This was a mess, this Spanish thing.
I remember.
I was working on the John Huntsman campaign in 2012.
I love John Huntsman.
He's the current ambassador to Russia.
I thought he was a terrific governor of Utah.
I thought he was a great ambassador.
I thought he was a great presidential candidate.
He made a very strategically poor decision during one debate where he started speaking in Mandarin Chinese.
And the idea here was the same thing that these guys were trying to do.
They want to show that they can speak this language.
If China is going to be the big threat and you can speak Chinese, that gives you a lot of credibility.
If America is becoming multilingual, if America's got all these Spanish-speaking immigrants coming in, it's very impressive if you too can speak Spanish.
It doesn't work.
People don't like it.
Especially in these early primary states.
Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina.
You think those guys are impressed that you speak Spanish?
None of them speak Spanish.
Nobody in those states speaks Spanish.
Very bad idea.
It's very offensive.
I found this to be the most offensive part of the debate last night.
They were talking about basically having post-birth abortion.
They were talking about abortion at any time during pregnancy on demand.
They were talking about socialism.
They were talking about getting rid of private health care.
And I found the most offensive part of it to be this stupid Spanish pandering.
This is America.
We speak English in America.
That's it.
There is very little that unites us as a country anymore.
Most of us don't share our religion.
Most of us don't share common experiences.
We don't share a common culture.
We don't all go watch the same TV shows, read the same books, or go to the same movies.
We have very little bit uniting us.
If we don't speak the same language, then we have basically nothing that unites us anymore.
I think it's great to speak other languages.
I speak other languages.
I studied Italian in school.
I studied Italian literature.
When I go to Italy, I speak Italian.
I get along in Italian.
When you go to Rome, do what the Romans do.
When I'm in America, I don't speak Italian all the time.
Even if I go to an Italian restaurant...
I don't sit there and say, okay, I'll have the wine and I'll have the appetizer and I will have gli spaghetti alla carbonara!
Per favore, signore!
Grazie, grazie mille!
No, I don't do that because that's weird because you're in America.
I'll say, I'll have this spaghetti alla carbonara, please.
Because we speak English in America.
This is America.
Now, the Democrats, they don't like America.
They don't like American traditions.
I don't think that's an exaggeration anymore.
They say they want to fundamentally transform the country.
You don't want to fundamentally transform things that you like.
You want to fundamentally transform things that you don't like.
And that was Barack Obama, one of his campaign platforms.
One of the pillars of his campaign.
One of the reasons that everyone is anxious about illegal immigration is because they fear that they're going to lose the country.
They fear that the country is going to be totally unrecognizable afterward.
I don't think this is going to play well in Peoria.
And worse for them, I don't think it's going to play well in early primary states.
Now, you'll notice that the leader of the PAC last night, Elizabeth Warren, she didn't speak Spanish because she understood this.
She didn't even speak Navajo, and I believe that's her native language, she said.
Beyond all the crazy Spanish, the Democrats were running very far left.
Liz Warren, who went in there as the kind of top of that PAC in last night's debate, she ran about as far left as she could.
She actually said she wouldn't put any limits on abortion.
We'll hear that clip.
We'll see how they get into the intersectional Olympics.
They run even further left than that.
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So they ran very far to the left.
Here is Liz Warren being asked, would you put any limits on abortion?
Here's her answer.
Senator Warren, would you put any limits on abortion?
I would make certain that every woman has access to the full range of reproductive health care services, and that includes birth control, it includes abortion.
So, no.
The answer is no.
I wouldn't put any limits on it whatsoever.
Only 6% of Americans, according to recent polls, believe there should be no limits on abortion whatsoever.
94% of Americans think there should be some limits on abortion.
No one on that stage is going to say that there should be limits on abortion.
Liz Warren, who's leading that pack, she's not the top of the pack in the whole field, but of the candidates who were at that debate last night, she is polling at the top.
She says no limits whatsoever.
So how are you going to outwoke somebody if they're already saying no limits, abortion on demand, without apology at any time?
Julian Castro figured out a way.
He figured out the one way to outwoke her, and that is by offering to extend abortion rights, not just to women, but to men.
I don't believe only in reproductive freedom.
I believe in reproductive justice.
And, you know, what that means is that just because a woman, or let's also not forget someone in the trans community, a trans female...
Is poor doesn't mean they shouldn't have the right to exercise that right to choose.
And so I absolutely would cover the right to have an abortion.
What?
What was that?
So trans women, this is just how they describe it.
A trans woman is a man, a biological man, who dresses up like a woman or thinks he's a woman or wants to be a woman.
So he would extend abortion rights to biological men.
That's very woke.
Also, I love his euphemism.
This is a new one.
I've never heard of it.
I wouldn't just have reproductive freedom.
I'd have reproductive justice.
He never describes what the difference is because they're just both completely meaningless words.
But what's most ironic about reproductive justice is he's describing a way to stop reproduction by unjustly killing someone.
So it's not only the opposite of reproduction, it's also the opposite of justice.
It's exactly the opposite of what he's saying it is.
Now, obviously, Cory Booker.
Cory Booker's not going to let Julian Castro hog all of that woke trans space.
It's like, all right, you're going to speak Spanish?
I'll speak Spanish.
You're going to talk about trans?
Okay, I'm going to one-up you.
I'm going to get even woker.
And Cory Booker got down to the real issues that Americans care about.
The issue that's at the top of all of our minds.
African American trans Americans, finally.
Look, civil rights is some place to begin, but in the African American civil rights community, another place to focus on was to stop the lynching of African Americans.
We do not talk enough about trans Americans, especially African American trans Americans.
Everyone had just been talking about issues like immigration or the economy or war.
No.
We need to talk about the statistically estimated 0.3...
0.036% of the population who are African-American, trans-Americans.
Because African-Americans are about 12-13% of the population.
Transgender people, people who are confused about their gender, are 0.3% of the population.
So you're about 0.3%.
0-36% of the population.
That is how you're going to win the presidential election.
I also wondered if African-American, trans-Americans are a contradiction in terms.
Because if you've got the American there, the African-American, but then the trans-American, do the Americans, therefore, because of the trans, cancel each other out?
So then you're just left with trans-Africans, which I believe is Rachel Dolezal.
And it is about time that our presidential candidates finally get some justice for Rachel Dolezal.
My favorite candidate of the night was Tim Ryan.
Who's Tim Ryan?
I don't know.
Do you know?
No, nobody knows.
Nobody still knows, even though he was at this debate.
He is an Ohio congressman.
I take it because I looked it up on Wikipedia afterwards.
He is pathetic in the true sense.
I don't mean to make fun of him.
I don't mean he's pitiful.
I mean he's pathetic.
He evokes pathos.
You really feel for the guy.
You have all the feels.
He is the only person on that stage who did not come across as a completely unctuous psychopath.
You actually kind of felt bad for him.
And unfortunately, one of the reasons you felt bad for him is because Tulsi Gabbard just absolutely destroyed his life in about 30 seconds.
Here she is.
You know what?
You felt like she was refunding you.
You get 30 seconds.
You're a very good man.
I appreciate that.
I hear what you're saying.
I would just say, I don't want to be engaged.
I wish we were spending all this money in places that I've represented that have been completely forgotten and we were rebuilding.
But the reality of it is, if the United States isn't engaged, the Taliban will grow.
And they won't have bigger, bolder terrorist acts.
We have got to have some present there.
The Taliban was there long before we came in.
They'll be there long before we leave.
We cannot keep U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan thinking that we're going to somehow squash this Taliban that has been there that every other country that's tried has failed.
I didn't say squash them.
When we weren't in there, they started flying planes into our buildings.
So I'm just saying right now...
The Taliban didn't attack us on 9-11.
Al-Qaeda didn't.
Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9-11.
That's why I and so many other people joined the military, to go after Al-Qaeda, not the Taliban.
The Taliban was protecting those people who were plotting against us.
Okay, he got the question sort of right at the end.
He said, no, the Taliban were harboring the Al-Qaeda terrorists, and we don't make a distinction between those two.
But she just ate his lunch, and he kind of, he didn't do anything.
She pounced, and he folded.
The strongest performance of the night, because Gabbard was pretty impressive.
She exceeded expectations.
Actually, even Booker exceeded expectations, which were already very low.
But the strongest performance of the night came from Elizabeth Warren.
She didn't say anything.
She just kept saying, I have a plan, I have a plan.
But she came off very strong, even though she'd never explained what her plans were.
Senator Warren, I want to continue on the Mitch McConnell thing, because you have a lot of ambitious plans.
You have a plan for that.
Okay.
We talked about the Supreme Court.
Do you have a plan to deal with Mitch McConnell today?
If you don't beat him in the Senate, if he's still sitting there as the Senate Majority Leader, it's very plausible you be elected president with a Republican Senate.
Do you have a plan to deal with Mitch McConnell?
I do.
That's it.
That's it.
That was her answer.
I do.
And then they applaud.
She doesn't say what the plan is.
Okay, that's fine.
So, they want strength.
She's offering strength.
And she's offering, you know, she's a real battle axe.
A battle tomahawk in the case of Elizabeth Warren.
She's a real, she's saying, I'm the tough one.
She's trying to, in some ways, pull a Trump strategy here.
But she doesn't give a lot of specifics.
This got even more ridiculous later on.
She kept just using these platitudes.
She kept just refusing to answer questions.
Chuck Todd actually called her out on it.
We need to treat this like the virus that's killing our children.
You didn't address, do you think the federal government needs to go and figure out a way to get the guns that are already out there?
What I think we need to do is we need to treat it like a serious research problem, which we have not done.
You know, guns in the hands of a collector Who's had them for decades, who's never fired, who takes safety seriously.
That's very different from guns that are sold and turned over quickly.
We can't treat this as an across-the-board problem.
We have to treat it like a public health emergency.
That means bring data to bear, and it means making real change in this country, whether it's politically popular or not.
Okay, thank you, Senator.
Thank you, Senator.
The question was, are you going to take away people's guns?
We need to take this seriously.
Yeah, I know, but are you going to take away people's guns?
I'm going to take it really, really seriously.
Okay, you're not going to answer.
Obviously ridiculous.
Whatever, she doesn't want to give what will end up being a very divisive answer.
The problem is her voice.
She is shrill.
That's not a woman thing.
That's not a sexist thing.
Tulsi Gabbard isn't shrill.
Amy Klobuchar isn't shrill.
Cory Booker is shrill.
And Liz Warren, who's at the top of this particular pack, is very shrill.
She sounds like a disingenuous wet blanket and a scold.
And it's very, very grating.
If she can fix her voice, she'll be the strongest candidate in the race, in the whole race.
Very intelligent.
She's a total killer.
She's polished.
She's strong.
She projects strength.
If she can't fix that voice, it's hard to see how people will ever come around to like her well enough to vote for her.
The big takeaway here, I think, is we all think Trump can be defeated.
He has weaknesses.
If the economy goes south, he'll really have weaknesses.
But does anyone really think he can be defeated by one of those people?
Seriously?
No.
No chance.
We'll see tonight if Biden or Sanders or Buttigieg can connect any better.
But otherwise, I think President Trump looking pretty good.
All right.
We got to bring on my old pal, Jamil Javani.
If you have not heard of Jamil, he has an incredible life story.
He's genuinely one of the most impressive people I've ever met.
I met him when I was in college and he was in law school.
So he was at actually the top law school in the country, if not the world.
And he wasn't always the top of his class.
He wasn't always the sharpest guy or the most applied guy.
He wasn't always applying his intelligence.
He was actually declared illiterate in high school.
Raised without a father, single mother.
He had been going down the path toward crime, path toward gangsterism.
And he was affiliated with the Nation of Islam.
He was going down these really dark ideologies, these radical ideologies.
Then he turned his life around.
And he became, when I was in school, he was like the big man on campus.
And he went on to be the big man after campus.
An activist, a lawyer, a published author, the author of an excellent new book, Why Young Men?
Jamil, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me, Michael, and thanks for the very kind introduction.
I appreciate it.
I gotta tell you, pal, you are by far one of the most, if not the most impressive guy I met during my entire time in college, and you've gone on to impress all of us even more in your life after law school.
I loved this book.
Very interesting.
I didn't agree with everything, or I wasn't totally convinced by it, but I thought you made a great case.
You weighed a lot of different sides of all of these arguments.
The question you ask is, why young men?
The dangerous allure of violent movements and what we can do about it.
So I have to ask you, for all the listeners, why young men?
Yeah, well, what I try to do in the book is show how the expert way that violent movements or radical ideologies are able to speak To the anger and frustration that a lot of young men feel.
And it's a sort of teenage or early 20-year-old angst that I think everyone relates to in some way.
I mean, most people, if you ask them to look back at pictures from high school, they shudder to think about what they were like back then.
But what these groups do really well is they reach young men and politicize those feelings and make you feel like there's someone you need to hate, there's someone you need to be resentful toward, and that you should adopt a purpose and a mission that is going to let you act on the feelings that you have.
And that brotherhood they offer, that camaraderie they offer in sharing that purpose and mission is what I think they do very effectively.
And what I explore in the book is how they're doing it more effectively for a lot of young men than schools are or churches are or out of touch public institutions that we trust to reach our young people.
Too often they're just not doing that very well.
How did you turn your life around?
I know a little bit of the answer to this.
You What changed?
Well, a lot of it for me came down to failing at doing the wrong things, right?
So I tried to be a gangster.
I wanted to drop out of school.
That plan didn't work out for me in large part because even though I was going through a lot of difficulty in my life and I didn't have a great relationship with my mom, she was still in my life.
And I think having her there, even when we didn't know how to talk to each other, meant a lot.
Jordan Peterson refers to this as having a light at the end of the tunnel, and I think my mother played that role for me.
So when the moments came where I almost bought a gun or I almost dropped out of school, I almost gave up on myself, I had that light where I was like, you know, maybe there is someone to disappoint.
There is someone who thinks higher of me than I think of myself.
And having that person meant a world of difference.
So when the time came where I exposed myself as not able to live up to my tough guy bravado and my gangster fairy tales, I lost all my friends overnight.
I mean, I knew that they think I was a chicken and a punk and much more vulgar words than that.
And I had to change my social circle.
And it's a hard thing for anyone of any age to do.
I'm not sure I would have been able to do it deliberately.
I did it without even realizing that's what was happening.
But when I changed my social circle, I finished up high school, went on to community college, had a whole host of different people in my life, all of a sudden I was starting to think and feel like a different person, and over time that made a world of difference.
And you mention in the book how just that act of committing yourself a little bit more to mainstream society, so you're not just hanging around on the street with a bunch of criminals anymore, you're going to community college, you're investing yourself And that leads you even more to invest yourself into the mainstream of society.
How do these young men get isolated in the first place?
And in a culture where we have declining religious institutions, declining civic participation, in some communities declining fatherhood, how do we pull them back from that isolation and get them a little, even to begin to be invested in the mainstream of society?
Yeah, so the different kind of violent movements I talk about, the gangs, the terror cells, the extremist networks online, what I think they share in common is an ability to communicate to young men that your frustrations are not your fault.
And so whatever unhappiness and dissatisfaction you feel at home or with your school or your job, or life is not what you wish it was in some way, You're able to then see that as, you know, quote-unquote mainstream society's fault.
It's rigged against me.
I'm not supposed to be successful.
And that ideology is really at the core of it because what that leads to is a certain kind of moral relativism, right?
Where you can say, yes, I know I shouldn't shoot people.
I know I shouldn't hate people.
But for me, it's okay because my life is particularly unfair because the deck is stacked against me in a way it isn't for other people.
So I get to live by a different code of conduct.
And when you start to think that way, you're really developing an antisocial compass for the world.
I mean, it's even hard to see it in the moment until you get those flashes where you realize, hey, the way I look in someone else's eyes, like, I look like a monster, and I didn't even realize that's what I was turning myself into.
I think about it as, you know, I use the example in the book of when I saw one of my closest friends appear in a Crime Stoppers press release.
And it was just like seeing the way he was talked about and the way he was characterized, it just dawned on me like, man, what have we become?
We've become these guys who go out and fight on the street and we treat women badly and we're angry and we cuss all day and we glorify drug dealers.
But it also happens in other contexts where you have like even that Charlottesville rally, you know, the Unite the Right rally a couple of years ago.
The young guys who wound up in that rally, you know, had their pictures taken, the UVA students and stuff.
I think that was a real shocker for them when they saw what it would look like to be presented as part of that kind of a group.
And they were like, oh, that's that's not.
How I thought I was coming across, right?
It's that moment where you realize how you are perceived by others and that moral relativism starts to break down, where I think you have those moments for transformation and real transformation becomes possible.
You know, the argument we've been hearing from the left for a long time on how people get radicalized into ISIS or radical Islam or whatever is, like Barack Obama would say, well, it's because they don't have jobs.
It's because they're poor.
You need to give them economic or material opportunity and then they won't be radicalized.
And in some cases, as you show in the book, there seems to be evidence of that.
In other cases, it's middle class kids, it's rich kids, it's not, the economic forces don't explain it.
What do you think is the relationship here between economic factors and cultural factors like fatherlessness and ideological factors, the actual ideology of the radical movements themselves?
Which are having the biggest influences on young men?
Yeah, I think a lot of young men, more than any other group of people in the human population, are driven by a desire for admiration and respect.
They want to feel respected, appreciated.
They want to feel strong.
I think we often react very poorly to paternalism, for example.
We don't like people to pity us, right?
And so when you're looking for that status, poverty is a significant barrier to that, of course.
I mean, there's a way to feel alienated by your society because you're like, A, I'm broke.
I don't think I'm ever going to not be broke, and I'm mad about that.
But you could think of that status as being elusive to people in a lot of other circumstances as well.
I mean, you could be a middle-class kid with, you know, like a lot of the young men who left the United Kingdom to join ISIS, for example, were university graduates.
I mean, they weren't lacking for opportunity.
But in their mind, because of their religion or because of their identity, they still couldn't get status in the United Kingdom.
They were being held back because they were part of this persecuted minority group in the West.
And so status is still something they're seeking, even though economics might not be the barrier to that status.
It's the same thing I try to explain to people who use the term white privilege a lot, for example.
Because when I say, you know, the reason I think a young white man might be drawn to a white nationalist organization is not very different from why a young Muslim man might be drawn to ISIS. They say, but the white guy's privilege.
Why would he feel alienated in the West, right?
I mean, look, his people...
They have all the jobs, they have all the money, they're all the politicians, blah blah blah.
And my answer is, well a lot of it is actually about his own vision of what status looks like.
And if he feels like he's being excluded, even though you might not think that because you're judging him based on his race, it doesn't mean that that's how he feels.
And understanding how he feels is really the point because you can have all your own ideas about how people are supposed to feel because of their race or their economic status or whatever it might be.
But if that's not how they see themselves, then, you know, your theory doesn't actually make a difference, right?
And that's a hard message for a lot of people to accept.
I think one of the things in the book I get the most pushback on, especially for more liberal or left-leaning audiences, is my desire to include white young men in the conversation.
And I conclude the book even criticizing President Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiative For purposely excluding white men.
Every other group of men in America was included in that initiative except for white men.
And I think it was a huge mistake because there are so many more things we have in common than different.
And that desire for status is what we all share, I think.
Yeah, absolutely right.
I think that analysis is so right.
It's pretty bold of you because I know that you'll get a lot of pushback on the left for that.
But it's a really compelling analysis.
And I really enjoyed the book.
Obviously, you are one of the sharpest guys I know.
So I highly recommend everyone go out and get Why Young Men?
The Dangerous Allure of Violent Movements and What We Can Do About It.
It's really terrific.
I read it in one sitting.
I couldn't put it down.
and so much of it is because of your personal story that is interwoven throughout the argument.
It's just really well done, my friend.
I can't wait to read your next book and see you sometime in the meantime.
And where can people find you, by the way?
I'm on Twitter at Jamil Javani, also Instagram, also Facebook.
Yeah, and I appreciate you having me on the show, Michael.
It's great to reconnect and I'm glad you enjoyed the book.
Absolutely.
All right, Jamil, thanks so much for coming on.
I've got to say goodbye now to Facebook and YouTube.
You've got to go to dailywire.com if you want to hear the mailbag.
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All right.
First question from Matthew.
Matthew.
Michael, ex-Lothario of the Daily Wire.
I just started seeing a conservative girl, and I'd like your advice.
We've been on two dates, and I'm wondering at what point should I attempt to kiss her?
Is there a general guideline on this?
How do you know when it is a good time to go in for the first kiss?
What telltale signs do most women give off that indicate that they would like to be kissed?
Best wishes and keep up the good work.
Matt.
These days, I believe the telltale sign you're looking for is a notarized contract witnessed by about seven people and stamped by a judge.
Traditionally, however, you've been on two dates, so now.
You should do it now.
Or yesterday.
The telltale signs that she wants you to kiss her are that she's gone on two dates with you.
Guys are very stupid about this.
I don't mean to single you out.
But guys get this wrong all the time.
They get shy.
They get nervous.
They overthink it.
They say, oh, I don't know if she really wants me to.
One time on one of my early dates with sweet little Elisa, we were like 16 or something, I had my arm around her kind of cuddling up watching a movie.
And I was thinking, oh, does she want me to kiss her?
Like, I don't know, idiot.
She's sitting with you and you got your arm around her and you're like, duh, what else are you going to do?
Are you going to play Yahtzee?
No.
So these guys get very nervous and they shy and everything.
So very often guys think that if they make a move too soon, it's going to ruin things.
It's going to be too presumptuous.
They think the bigger risk is to make a move too soon.
The far greater risk is not making a move and seeming too timid.
You're on the date.
You've gone on two dates.
You've gone on three dates.
Whatever.
She's there.
The purpose of going on dates is to get a little smooch at the end.
Go for it.
Kiss the girl.
And if she rejects you, too bad.
And you go on a date with another girl.
From Ryan.
Hi, Michael.
I just started a new job as an accounting manager and my company is doing a gay pride event this month.
Everyone on my team has said they're going, but I do not feel comfortable celebrating something that I consider to be a sin.
Should I just go and hold my tongue for appearance sake?
I feel like if I don't go, I'm running the risk of offending my new team and starting unwanted religious and political conversations at work.
Yeah, well, you won't be starting the unwanted political and religious conversations.
Your teammates and your colleagues are starting that by inviting you to a gay pride parade.
I mean, pride, forget the gay part.
Pride is the deadliest sin.
It's the queen of all sins.
I don't celebrate pride at all, ever.
Gay pride, straight pride, asexual pride.
Pride is not a good thing to celebrate.
So, if I were you, I wouldn't go.
Depends what kind of man you want to be.
Are you going to be the kind of guy who is going to compromise on your morals and go celebrate something you don't want to celebrate and you think is wrong and immoral?
Or not?
What I would do is...
I wouldn't stand up and make a speech, and I'm not sure exactly if you're objecting to the gay stuff or the pride stuff or both of it, but I wouldn't get up there and, you know, like have your Westboro Baptist Church signs or something, make some grand declaration.
I would just say, oh yeah, I'm busy.
What are you busy doing?
Anything else.
But that's what I would do.
I wouldn't go.
I wouldn't make a big deal about it.
And you're right.
They're probably going to...
Some of the more left-wing, aggressive people are probably going to make a big deal out of it.
That's the cost of having beliefs and standing up for them.
It's so inappropriate that the left does this.
The right doesn't get to do this.
Even, forget traditional religion or Christianity, even on civic religion, even say, hey, we're going out to the 4th of July parade and we're going to shoot off fireworks and wave the American flag and sing God Bless America.
You guys want to all come out?
That would be a much more acceptable thing to say, right?
We're all part of this American nation.
We're all supposed to believe in America and love America.
But if you said that at your office, you'd be brought into HR, saying you can't bring politics into the office.
But if people are inviting you to a gay pride parade, You almost have to go.
It's almost mandatory.
I would stand firm, not do it, but then you've got to accept the consequences.
I've had professional consequences for standing up for things.
If you're unwilling or unable to make those sacrifices or hold the risk of those sacrifices, then you're in a tough spot.
From Valentino.
Oh, knowledgeable former future Press Secretary Michael Knowles, in regard to the flag-burning amendment, I've been on Team Knowles until I thought about the conflict it will have with the First Amendment.
Given the proposed amendment, what would be the constitutionality of flag-burning in a film?
Would love to have your thoughts on this, Valentino.
Hashtag, came for Ben, stayed for future former Press Secretary Knowles.
Thank you.
There's this proposal from Steve Daines to create an amendment to the Constitution to make it unlawful to burn a flag, the American flag, to desecrate the American flag.
Right now, the First Amendment protects Flag of desecration.
So if you pass an amendment, you no longer have that constitutional issue.
I think I'm the only conservative commentator who supports the idea of this amendment, of this flag-burning amendment.
All the rest are saying, no, free speech.
The founders would have loved to burn American flags.
I see no evidence of that at all.
But you bring up a great objection, which is, what if you're making a work of art where you have to burn a flag?
Well, how about rape?
Rape is illegal, as it should be, and yet there are rape scenes in movies.
How do they do the rape scenes?
They fake it.
So you could easily fake burning a flag in a movie.
With CGI, you could easily do it.
Most times people light things on fire in movies, they do it by CGI anyway.
That's one way to fake it.
Now, another way to fake it, because an objection to that, I guess, would be if you're even faking it, you are desecrating the flag.
You are burning the flag.
I don't think that's really true.
If you draw an image of a flag on fire, that's not the same thing as setting a flag on fire.
If you have a film that shows a flag on fire, that's not the same thing as when you were filming it actually setting the flag on fire.
But moreover, you could fake it in other ways.
You could be missing one star.
You could be missing one stripe.
You could have the colors a little off or something.
You could fake it that way.
So you're actually burning something, but it's only got 49 stars.
You might say this is really trivial.
This is a distinction without a difference.
No, it's not.
You are, you want to, first of all, when you act, when you make a film or you do a play, you are pretending.
You're not really, you know, there's that great clip of Ian McKellum on extras.
How do you act so well?
Well, what I do is I say my lines that they write down in the script, and then I walk to the place where they tell me to be.
When I'm Gandalf, I'm not really Gandalf, I'm Sir Ian, but I'm pretending to be Gandalf the Wizard.
That's the same thing.
You could pretend to burn an American flag, which is quite different.
That would be a distinction that I think wouldn't affect the quality of art at all and also would maintain the sacred, which is the purpose of the flag-burning amendment.
For a nation to thrive and have some coherence and cohesion...
You need to have some sense of the sacred, some sanctity around the nation itself.
And that is the purpose of an anti-flag burning or anti-flag desecration amendment.
You would still be able to preserve that if you faked the burning in other ways.
The other aspect of this for film is back when we had limits on what you could film, we had committees deciding what could be censored, what could be shown, what couldn't be shown, the movies were better.
You had some of the greatest movies ever made.
Wow, there was censorship.
Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, all, I mean, you could go on and on and on.
Why is that?
It's because constraints breed creativity.
What the postmodern wacky people think is that you only get creativity when you get rid of constraints, but that's not true.
It's why spoken word poetry is the death of art, slam poetry, while Shakespeare, who's writing with a ton of constraints, I mean, meter constraints, length constraints, the constraints of the sonnet, is writing the greatest poetry in the history of the English language.
The constraints breed the creativity.
This happened in film already, and if we have this one particular constraint on film, which would be you can't actually set a flag on fire while you burn it, I don't see any reason why the principle wouldn't hold there, too.
From Noah.
Hello.
Me and a friend were having an argument about college debt forgiveness.
I told him college education was not a right and the government's job is to protect civil liberties and defend individual freedom.
He said that inalienable rights only exist because some people came up with them and they can therefore be added to.
How do I better explain the difference between commodities luxuries and rights guaranteed by the government?
I think I understand, but come off as condescending.
Thank you for everything your crew does.
Great question.
You're both wrong.
Government does much more than just protect natural rights.
We know this, right?
Government tells 19-year-olds that they can't buy a pack of cigarettes.
Government forces me to buy only cars that have a certain fuel efficiency standard.
I might object to those sort of things, but it is certainly the case that the government can and does do much more than just protect natural rights.
Now, this doesn't mean that we can't derive a sense of rights from the natural law.
It But you kind of both have a point here.
I always go back to Edmund Burke on this.
Edmund Burke is the mac daddy godfather of modern conservative thought.
He said, what is the use of discussing man's abstract right to food or medicine?
The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them.
There's no natural right to modern healthcare, right?
If that were the case, then every human being for all of history was denied their human rights until about 100 years ago.
So what does it even mean then for it to be a human right if statistically all the humans who ever lived didn't have it?
It is also the case that the government could create a program to give out medical care, It could.
Government does a zillion things.
It could create another welfare program for medical care.
Government takes over aspects of the economy.
It could take over a sixth of the economy by taking over healthcare.
Loan forgiveness.
The government's already involved in loan forgiveness.
The government's already involved in subsidizing loans.
It's already involved in, it created this bubble in the first place, actually.
And this is where you get to the real argument.
The better argument for your friend is that the student loan forgiveness proposal is colossally stupid.
One, the reason that we have this huge bubble is because the government was subsidizing loans in the first place.
And two, we rely on debt and credit.
What is debt?
Why do people go into debt?
They go into debt because they think that having money now is better than waiting for the money they're going to have later.
They're borrowing against their future earnings potential.
And in the case of college, even as expensive as it is, College graduates, the median college graduate, make 75% more per year than the median high school graduate without a college degree.
So the guy's saying, oh, if I can make 75% more per year, I'll take out $50,000 worth of loans because I'll make it back, pay it off.
That's how debt works.
It's great that we have a system of credit.
We use credit all the time.
We use credit to buy cars.
We go into debt.
We go into debt to buy a house.
And it's how modern economies work.
It's how economies grow.
The minute that you forgive everyone's student debt, $1.6 trillion over 45 million people, the minute you do it, it's not just that you tinker with that system, you get it a little bit messed up, you completely destroy that system of credit.
What creditor could lend out money at that point?
No one has any incentive ever to pay off that debt.
When I know the government's just going to come in randomly and pay off all the debt, I'm never going to make a student loan payment.
The reason all those people were making student loan payments is because they didn't think the government was going to bail them out.
They thought they had to take care of it.
So you now have a system where the individual is never going to make their loan payments, so it's going to be much harder to get that credit in the first place.
The government does few things efficiently, and whenever the government intervenes, and the more it intervenes, the crazier the unexpected secondary effects are.
The more egregious, the more harmful those effects can be.
And if you're forgiving, 45 million loans for 1.6 trillion dollars.
When you're intervening in that education industry, the method of education, then you are giving the government control over education itself.
You're destroying the instrument by which it's currently funded and you're giving government control over that means, which means he who pays the piper calls the tune.
When the government gets involved, how do things turn out?
When the government gets involved in education, how do things turn out?
Not very well.
It's a major threat to education.
It's a major power grab.
That's why they want it.
Alright, that's our show.
We've got more to get to, but we'll do it next time.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Enjoy El Secondo Debato Tonight-o.
We'll have some commentary on that on Monday.
See you then.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
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.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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