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July 11, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:28
Ep. 380 - Has Politics Ever Been This Fun?

President Trump hosts a social media summit at the White House, AOC calls Nancy Pelosi a racist, and Britain almost blows aggressive Iranian boats out of the water. Date: 07-11-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump hosts a social media summit at the White House today to combat big tech censorship.
Meanwhile, star Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls Nancy Pelosi a racist.
Then, Iran tries to seize a British tanker, so the Brits threaten to blow Iran's boats out of the water.
We ask the important question, has politics ever been this fun?
All that and more, plus the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Some people like to pretend that politics has never been this bad.
They say, oh no, the chaos in the White House.
Oh no, the chaos in the crazy left and the Democrats.
We do this because we like to feign hardship.
This is something that people do.
This is how people bond sometimes in groups.
If you're meeting a new group of people, if you're working together or you're on a project together, you're at a conference or something, you'll notice people like to complain because they sometimes bond over imagined or real hardship.
But I am here to tell you, especially with today's news cycle, politics has never been this fun.
And it is nowhere clearer than in President Trump's tweet storm about the social media summit.
Talk about taking a frustrating news item and turning it to just pure joy.
We'll get to that in a second.
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There's a social media summit going on at the White House right now.
Why are they doing this?
Because the social media big tech companies, every single one of them, have shown that they are willing to censor conservatives.
And it started out with the fringy people like Alex Jones and then it moved into more mainstream kind of comedian types like Gavin McGinnis.
Then they started going after Steven Crowder, who's about as mainstream as they get.
They're going after all of us.
They've demonetized a lot of my videos on YouTube.
They have restricted or outright censored some of my videos on YouTube.
They restricted my PragerU video about how important words are.
They're going after all of us.
So President Trump is going to hold a White House summit.
Here is how he announced the summit on Twitter.
Quote, The fake news media will also be there, but for a limited period.
The fake news is not as important or as powerful as social media.
They have lost tremendous credibility since that day in November 2016 that I came down the escalator with the person who is to become your future first lady.
When I ultimately leave office in six years, or maybe 10 or 14, just kidding, they will quickly go out of business for lack of credibility or approval from the public.
That's why they will all be endorsing me at some point, one way or the other.
Could you imagine having sleepy Joe Biden or Alfred E. Newman or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas, 1,000 out of 24th, I think he got that fraction wrong, as your president rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true stable genius?
Sorry to say that even social media would be driven out of business along with, and finally, the fake news media.
I'm sorry.
I thought I could get through it, and I can't.
I also want to point out, there are some kind of random capitalizations in here.
When he was referring to Pete Buttigieg, who he calls Alfred E. Newman, like the Mad Magazine character, he actually tagged an Alfred E. Newman account, so I don't know who that person is.
This was a masterpiece.
Comparative literature classes, poetry classes, are going to be studying this tweetstorm in the future for its rhetorical brilliance.
I'm not kidding.
What more could you want?
This is...
It's hilarious, and it actually accomplishes something.
So a lot of people, what they think is that Trump's tweet storms are just gratuitous, they're crazy, they're weird, they're wacky.
They might be weird, they might be wacky, but they're not gratuitous.
They actually are accomplishing something.
They have a point.
He's not just writing them because they're funny.
He's writing them because they are calling attention to the social media summit.
We haven't heard a whole lot about this social media summit.
A couple headlines here and there, but the mainstream media and the big tech companies have had every interest in blacking it out.
It hasn't really been trending on social media.
Mainstream media haven't been covering it.
Why?
Because conservative voices in social media are a huge threat to both of those institutions.
So how does Trump call attention to it?
Is he sends out this wacky tweet storm that is too much to ignore.
So he, how does he, he goes after the fake news.
So he hits them really hard, but maybe they could ignore that.
Then he says we won't let them get away with it much longer, so there's a threat.
You'd think they'd probably have to cover the threat.
Then he just starts talking about how he walked down the escalator with his wife, and that's kind of strange.
Then he says he might leave office in 10 or 14 years, so he might stay beyond his constitutional term limits.
He says just kidding, but you just feel if you're in the media, you have to report on that.
Then he makes fun of Joe Biden.
Then he makes fun of Pete Buttigieg.
Then he makes fun of Elizabeth Warren.
And as he's making fun of her, he gets the fraction wrong.
She's one 1024th Native American.
He says it's 1000 out of 24th, which would make her incredibly Native American.
It would make her many, many multiples Native American.
It's 1000 divided by 24 is quite a lot.
Then he uses this phrase, which is the one that's actually been plucked out.
So great looking and smart, a true stable genius.
The media at this point, even if they could ignore the other stuff, they can't ignore that because it's hilarious and they will use that to pretend that Trump is a crazy narcissist.
He's not.
He's just really, really good at getting attention because he's gotten everyone's attention.
Obviously, he's got my attention.
I'm reading the whole thing.
But everybody has been doing this in the mainstream media today.
And now we're talking about the social media summit.
So what is the social media summit?
Trump invited his most ardent social media supporters to the White House to discuss censorship.
So CNN, now that they have to report on this, CNN has been describing them as right-wing extremists.
The White House is in chaos as the right-wing extremists dissent.
So who was invited?
The head of the students for Trump, See, a right-wing extremist, and he's the young Trump supporter.
A Twitter account named Carpe Donctum, which describes itself as the eternally sarcastic memesmith specializing in the creation of memes to support President Donald J. Trump.
And the talk show host Bill Mitchell, who is a huge Trump supporter.
His Twitter banner is just like a glowing golden picture of Donald Trump.
These are not far-right people.
He's not inviting...
White nationalists, neo-Nazis, all the regular gang that the mainstream media scaremongers with.
He is, however, inviting eccentric people.
I mean, one of the guy's names is Carpe Donctum.
That's pretty eccentric.
This sends the right message.
The message that this is sending is that the White House is not going to back down on this.
So he's threatening.
He's saying there will be consequences.
What will the consequences be?
I don't know.
He probably doesn't know.
But he's saying there will be.
He then holds the summit, which in itself shows that they're taking this seriously.
And then, crucially, he's not just inviting the buttoned-up people.
He's not just inviting the ones who have bowties on and who are really super serious and have a lot of law degrees.
He's inviting these hardcore pro-Trump social media accounts with names like Carpe Donctum.
He's saying we're not going to give an inch.
We're not going to apologize at all.
It sends an important message into 2020.
We'll get to that in a second, and then we'll get to this wonderful story about Nancy Pelosi.
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So what is the message that Trump is sending here into 2020?
The previous GOP strategy, this is like BT. We're dividing time between BT and, I don't know, AT, the year of our Trump.
In BT, in before Trump time, the GOP would have experienced all this censorship, would have experienced all this slander, all of these smears, and they would have stayed quiet.
Don't dignify it with a response.
Don't acknowledge the eccentric figures in our ranks, people who give themselves names like Carpe Donctum and who post memes all over Twitter.
No, no, we just wear bow ties and we go to really fancy lunches in Washington.
I love George W. Bush, but George W. Bush did not know how to handle the media.
Same thing with Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney had no idea how to handle the media.
Still doesn't.
Trump doubles down.
And he doesn't just double down and say, I defend this person.
I defend their right to free speech.
He doubles down about how good-looking he is.
He invites carpe donctum to the White House.
This shows boldness.
It's not just words.
It's not just paying lip service to giving everyone a fair shot.
He is actually exhibiting that boldness himself.
We talk about this all the time.
The best...
This defense is a good offense.
This has always been the case.
So my only criticism of this event is that I'm not there.
But I'll be in D.C. in a couple weeks, so maybe I'll get to stop by the Covfefe Palace then.
That is the hope.
This is good news on the GOP front.
But there's even more good news, which is on the Democrat front.
And this is the chickens coming home to roost.
This was only a matter of time.
For years now, the left has baselessly smeared conservatives as bigots.
We've warned the whole time this is harmful to the public discourse.
It's dangerous in a democratic republic.
You shouldn't be able to just smear people as bigots.
The Democrats haven't cared.
They've egged it on.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost because the Democrats are starting to use this same cynical strategy against the older Democrats.
How did all of this start?
How did AOC and her compatriots start accusing Nancy Pelosi of racism?
This all started because the most vocal Democrat showboaters on this border crisis refused last week to vote for funding to help mitigate the crisis.
That's Ilhan Omar, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley.
These are all the young radicals who every day have me wondering if President Trump should just dissolve the Congress and name himself king for life.
I mean, if this is the future of our country, this is the future of Congress, doesn't look very good.
And so they've been talking about how important it is to fund this crisis and get the beds and get the sheets and help the kids.
And then it comes time for a bipartisan border funding bill This had broad bipartisan agreement, and they wouldn't do it.
And even mainstream leftists called them out over this hypocritical border vote.
Here is Rashida Tlaib on Martha Raddatz's show on ABC trying to answer for her hypocritical vote.
McAleenan has been sounding the alarm for months for resources to help the migrants.
You voted against the $4.6 billion emergency border bill to deal with the surge of migrants.
That included almost $3 billion to provide shelter and care for unaccompanied children.
Acting Secretary McAleenan says those funds are critical to get children out of CPP custody and transferred.
Even if the bill didn't have anything you wanted.
Listen to this.
Do you know what the CPP agents said on the ground though, Martha?
She's proud.
I'm this, I'm that.
She won't even let Martha Raddatz get the question out because she knows the question is a total indictment of her.
So Nancy Pelosi uses this opportunity to show, look, guys, these screeching, ignorant, young congresswomen don't know anything.
They're not...
Actually, the leaders of this party were the ones getting things done.
Pelosi tells the New York Times and tells Maureen Dowd, who's a columnist there, quote, All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn't have any following.
They're four people, and that's how many votes they got.
Pretty harsh criticism from the Speaker of the House.
She's completely right.
AOC made it to Congress with 14,000 votes.
There are about a quarter million registered voters in her district, maybe more than that.
She got 14,000 votes in that primary that no one thought was going to matter because there was an entrenched incumbent.
And it was Joe Crowley.
He'd been there for a long time.
And he didn't campaign.
She went in.
She got 14,000 votes.
She wins the primary.
She makes it to Congress.
So she's got this huge, almost 5 million person Twitter following.
no one actually in her district likes her that much.
She's polling very low in her district.
In fact, part of the reason why AOC is making such a spectacle of herself is because there's a fair chance that she won't get reelected.
There's rumors up in New York that they're going to redistrict her out of her district.
So she makes this big spectacle.
AOC seizes on that.
How can, or rather Pelosi seizes on that toward AOC.
Now, how can AOC respond to, She could respond by showing why Nancy Pelosi is wrong on the border.
She could respond by making a principled argument about Congress's complicity in the border crisis.
She could respond by trying to secure the border and discouraging people from putting themselves in this position in the first place by crossing illegally.
But she didn't do any of that because she's a hardcore radical leftist and she doesn't know anything.
So instead, she called Pelosi racist.
And I, oh, I love it so much.
Oh, it's just the greatest.
I wish they would do this all the time.
She tells the Washington Post, quote, the persistent singling out, it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful.
The explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.
Take that, Nancy Pelosi.
It wasn't just AOC. Ilhan Omar jumped on this bandwagon, too.
She tweeted out, quote, patético.
I guess she must have learned from Beto O'Rourke and Cory Booker and Julian Castro and Jose Diaz-Balart that in America now we speak Spanish instead of English.
I don't know.
I wonder why they call her un-American.
Patético, she writes.
You know they're just salty about who is wielding the power to shift public sentiment these days.
Sis, sorry, not sorry.
It's like the worst combination of millennial thinking and millennial language.
The millennial thinking is if you disagree with me, you're a bigot.
Everyone who disagrees with me is Hitler.
That's the millennial leftist mantra.
And then there's all this stupid language.
You call each other cis.
S-I-S, like sister.
Which means you're assuming their gender, and that's horribly offensive as far as I'm concerned.
Then they'll say things like sorry, not sorry, just these sort of vapid expressions.
And the point is just very blunt and simple.
She's calling Nancy Pelosi a racist.
What's ironic about this, and you know my feelings on Nancy Pelosi, there is no evidence that Nancy Pelosi harbors some racial bigotry.
It's like when they tried to call Biden a racist.
There's no evidence of that.
There is, however, plenty of evidence that these young fresh faces, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, those people, that they actually do harbor racial bigotry.
Ilhan Omar, just to remind you, has claimed that Israel hypnotized the world and she has publicly prayed to Allah to awaken people to the evil of Israel.
She has claimed that politicians only support Israel because the Jews bribe them.
And she has also claimed that Jews aren't loyal to the United States.
Repeatedly done this, Ilhan Omar.
Pelosi was the one who had to say, hey, lady, cool it on the racism.
Ayanna Pressley, who's another one of these fresh faces, she tweeted out just yesterday or two days ago.
To Kellyanne Conway, quote, Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with like weird leftist millennial speak, Becky is a derogatory term for white women.
So Becky is considered this generic white woman name.
It's kind of like calling someone a cracker.
It's saying you're bland.
You know, to be a white woman is to be sort of uninteresting and boring.
This is the sort of thing that we would expect from Ayanna Pressley.
To give you context, Ayanna Pressley is a graduate of the same college as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and it shows.
Pressley, rather, has never done anything in her professional life other than work for politicians or be a politician.
So she's got a very narrow and shallow background.
But just consider the racism of that statement.
To call, to criticize Kellyanne Conway on the basis of her race.
Imagine if a white congresswoman referred to a black senior White House advisor by some stereotypically black name, as though that were a slur.
If they said, oh hi distraction Shaniqua, oh hi distraction Chantel, I don't know.
Imagine the outrage that you would hear from that.
Actually, you don't have to imagine it because, forget a Republican congresswoman, a comedian, a generally left-wing comedian, one time made a racially offensive joke about a black senior White House aide who was Valerie Jarrett.
That was Roseanne Barr who made that joke.
She lost her network TV show within hours.
But Ayanna Pressley, fresh-faced Democratic congresswoman, does the exact same thing to a woman in the exact same position Nothing.
Nada.
Doesn't matter.
They don't bring it up.
This has always been the double standard.
And I suspect it's going to continue to be the double standard.
Conservatives have always just dealt with it.
I mean, it is hard to fight back against this because we don't want to get in the muck with them as much as they do.
It's just disgusting.
You don't want to get into a fight with a skunk because either way you're not going to leave smelling very good.
But now, finally, the Democrats themselves are experiencing the poisonous fruits of their decades of racial divisiveness.
This is it.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi and her whole crew, they stoked this racial resentment.
They stoked all of this racial division.
And now they are the victims of it.
Because it never ends.
If you have a politics that's just based on division and entitlement and resentment and envy...
That's not going to end.
We're not going to reach a point where those evil, wicked lusts and passions are satisfied.
They are ravenous passions.
They go on forever.
And now the Democrats are eating their own, and it's absolutely fabulous to watch.
Meanwhile, during this entire clown show, One story that has not really gone mentioned is we've more or less just averted a war with Iran.
Like yesterday, yesterday the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the military wing of Iran, attempted to seize a British oil tanker in the Persian Gulf.
So Iran for weeks now has been provoking the West because they're trying to create a sense of urgency to save the Iran deal that is more or less expired and they're trying to save certain waivers from Europe so that Europe can continue to cooperate with Iran.
And So what did they do?
They set a couple oil tankers on fire.
They shot down our drone out of the sky.
They're trying to provoke us into some kind of conflict to scare the entire world about a war in Iran and a war in the Middle East so that we'll give in to them and basically appease Iran.
I guess we've forgotten that appeasement hasn't worked very well in history.
So Iran now, the latest thing they've done, because the US and Europe has really handled these provocations with great restraint and pretty well.
So what they did yesterday is they sent a couple boats to go seize a British oil tanker.
What they didn't expect, though, is that the British oil tanker was being escorted by the HMS Montrose.
So you've got this incredibly provocative maneuver by Iran to basically force the oil tanker into Iranian waters so that they can seize it.
At that point, that's when the Brits turned their 4.5-inch main gun and their surface ship torpedo defense on the Iranian boats, in addition to two 30-millimeter automatic machine guns and a sea-captor missile system.
And just to kick it all off, they deployed their rocket-launching helicopter to circle the Iranian boats.
So it's just like...
These little, you know, Iranian bullies pull up and then you just see the full weight of the British Empire as though it were resurrected again in the Straits of Hormuz and the Iranians back off.
Of course, what are they going to do?
They blow them out of the water.
This was the very subdued response from the British.
The Royal Navy, HMS Montrose, which was also there, pointed its guns at the boats and warned them over radio at which point they dispersed.
Classic British understatement.
It's as if to say, yes, well, no big deal.
It's okay.
We averted it.
This was a major provocation.
This could have turned into open fire.
How was this averted?
How was the possibility of war averted?
It was because the British were prepared to go to war.
I mean, this is the premise that we've been talking about for weeks.
The way you get peace is is by being prepared for war.
You get peace through strength.
It's the phrase of Ronald Reagan.
It's the phrase of Barry Goldwater.
It's the phrase of conservatives now for 70 years.
Peace through strength.
You'll hear the left try to browbeat conservatives and say, you're warmongers, you're hawks, you're bloodthirsty because we want to build up the military.
You should point out to them that the two most peaceful presidents in modern history Are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
And those are the two guys who are called cowboys.
Those are the two guys who are called warmongers.
Those are two guys who have built up the military dramatically.
But they've built up the military because they know by building it up, they're reducing the likelihood that we're going to actually have to deploy the military.
Bullies...
When you don't stand up to a bully, when you appease a bully, that is an open invitation for aggression.
That is an open invitation for war.
When you stand up to them and you deploy your rocket launching helicopter to circle them and you point all your guns at them and you say, we will blow you out of the water, not a shot is fired.
forward.
That's how you have peace.
It's a lesson the left doesn't usually get, but we should send it because the lessons of history are clear.
Appeasement doesn't work, and being prepared for war does work.
And moreover, imagine if a bullet had gone off yesterday.
We would be talking today about possible war with Iran.
And now we don't have to talk about that.
Now we just get to talk about Donald Trump calling himself good-looking and youthful and a very stable genius and making fun of Sleepy Joe and making fun of Alfred E. Newman, Pete Buttigieg and watching the Democratic Party implode on its own premises because now they're just all calling each other racists and bigots.
We get this wonderful news cycle.
Politics has never been more fun than it is right now.
And the reason it's fun is because we're We're extraordinarily prepared.
We're showing a tough face to big tech, tough face to censorship, tough face to Iran.
Because we are standing up Willing to do hard things.
We get to have as much fun and we get to guzzle as many leftist tears as we want.
We've got to get to the mailbag.
But first, speaking of leftist tears, go over to dailywire.com.
You get me.
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You get the Matt Walsh show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
That's coming up right now.
You get to ask questions backstage.
You get another kingdom.
You get everything.
And you get the leftist tears tumbler.
Never more important than now.
And it's only going to heat up as we approach 2020.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
Jumping right in from Brett.
Michael, was Martin Luther King a socialist?
Yes.
Yes, he was.
Don't take my word for it.
In a letter dated July 18, 1952, Martin Luther King wrote, quote, I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.
It was 1952.
One of the lines that sometimes conservatives will say is that Martin Luther King for most of his life was very conservative and he was very capitalistic and oriented toward free markets.
And then only later in his life, in the early 1960s, did he become a little more radical and more socialistic.
That isn't true.
He always had a pretty socialist economic bent to him.
Both sides want to claim Martin Luther King.
The conservatives claim Martin Luther King because of his most famous speech, I Have a Dream, in which he talks about a world in which racial division won't matter and black children will play with white children.
And this is a vision that conservatives love.
And the left claims Martin Luther King because he said certain things that these days we might call identitarian.
He was an advocate for black people, for black rights, because he was economically quite radical.
He wanted a jobs program.
He wanted the war on poverty.
He wanted more socialist economics.
He, at one point, talked about the nationalization of industry as being a good thing.
And so he's a complex figure.
We have made him a simple figure because we claim him as a secular saint.
We have a day for him.
We celebrate him on the secular liturgical year.
We've turned him into a legend that he really was not.
He had supreme moral clarity in certain areas.
If you watch his speech, I've Been to the Mountaintop, it's one of the most powerful speeches in American history.
And then he was murdered the next day.
Then you learn that he was one of the most prolific womanizers in the history of American politics.
You realize that he didn't always practice his moral vision himself, and parts of his moral vision were wrong, like socialism.
The worship, the veneration of Martin Luther King, veneration is the better word here, the veneration of Martin Luther King is problematic because he's a sort of problematic figure.
This is why a lot of conservatives at the time that the Martin Luther King Day was created suggested that if there was going to be a day for the advancement of black people and for the abolition of slavery and to commemorate the advancement of civil rights, particularly for blacks, that that day should celebrate Frederick Douglass rather than Martin Luther King.
And I tend to be of that persuasion too.
I think Frederick Douglass is one of the greatest writers in American history.
He was profoundly anti-socialist.
He defended the rights of property, and this obviously partakes much more of sort of our theories of natural law and the foundation on which the country was built.
So it would be nice to have a Frederick Douglass day.
It would be nice if he were the one that we were to look to because, unfortunately, the left has a point when they say Martin Luther King had many leftist dogmas and many socialist dogmas.
That's true, and it was true even in the early 1950s.
From Adam...
Would you rather meet and have a conversation with your great-great-great grandfather or your great-great-great grandson?
Who would you like to learn more from, the past or the future?
Certainly my great-great-great-grandfather.
There's no question about that.
I don't care what happens to my great-great-great-great-grandson.
I don't care what his world is like.
It won't affect me.
I'll be long dead by the time he comes around.
To meet my great-great-great-grandson would compromise my free will because I'd see how history has unfolded.
And so I wouldn't be living it in real time.
I would be dooming myself to a sort of fatalism or a determinism.
And I don't want any of that.
But I am interested in the future, and the way that you learn about the future is you learn about the past.
Because we live our lives in narrative, we live our lives in stories, and our understanding of the past profoundly influences our understanding of the present, which shapes our future.
So I would love to meet my great-great-great-grandfather, and for a couple reasons.
One, I think there's a lot that has been lost over the last 100 or 200 years, and so it would be good to see what's been lost and try to bring it back.
On the other hand, I think conservatives in particular are given to nostalgia, which is history after a few drinks, as my priest Father Rutler says.
So you don't want to be nostalgic either.
You want to talk to this guy and he'll tell you, yeah, things weren't so great then either.
Yeah, we had the same daily concerns that you guys have too.
And this is what happens generally when you open a history book.
When you engage with the reality of history, you realize that the legends that we tell ourselves aren't quite so simple.
And actually what happened is much more complicated and much more interesting from Anonymous.
Dear Michael, King of Covfefe.
My girlfriend and I have had issues lately.
We've been dating for four years and recently have discovered some religious and philosophical differences in us.
For example, she's open to the idea of Christianity, but she can't guarantee conversion.
She doesn't explicitly denounce abortion as evil, etc.
What do you suggest is the best course of action?
Do I try to convert her to my Christian morals and beliefs?
If so, how?
I love her very much and want to make this work.
Thanks.
All the best, Anonymous.
I would not recommend picking a girlfriend or a fiancé or a wife based on some checklist because I would not recommend doing it based on whether she checks off all the boxes.
I think that's so clinical.
It's not how love really works.
And what we're talking about is love.
You're not just picking someone to serve you.
You are falling in love.
And if you're falling in love, then your love for that person, your desire, your will, will help to transform that person.
You know, I've known sweet little Elisa since we were about 10 years old.
And we dated in high school.
We split for college.
We got back together later.
We've kind of weaved in and out.
We were always in each other's lives, though.
And you learn something, which is you either grow together or you grow apart.
And it is almost impossible not to grow together if you love each other and you spend a lot of time together.
You sort of have to.
I mean, this happens with your friends.
You will be influenced by your friends.
You will be known by the friends you keep.
And that is all the more true when you're talking about someone you're dating or fiancé or wife.
That said, it doesn't mean you should just lay off and say, oh, it doesn't matter at all.
If you have religious and philosophical differences, you should talk about it.
Not in a scolding way, not in a debating way, but in a loving way.
You think that you understand the truth and you obviously then want to convince the person you love of the truth.
And I suspect the same is true of her.
You know, since I've been 10 years old, since I met sweet little Elisa, she and I have held very different views.
We've kind of gone in all sorts of directions.
And we've grown together.
Now we agree on probably most things.
But it's not always the case.
And our views are changing on things all the time, too.
That's the way that I would do it.
Cole Porter sang, let's do it, let's fall in love.
He didn't say, let's do it, let's make sure that on a checklist we all check every single box and that you can be a good spouse for me and fulfill my needs.
That's not how it goes.
You want to make sure that you don't have fundamental oppositional ideas of the world.
I mean, that's going to be very important when you raise children.
But it doesn't sound like that's quite the issue.
So I would...
I would say go along with it and, you know, have a love affair.
And if it stops working, it's fine.
Break up, find somebody else.
But if you're just worried about something 30 years down the road, some problem that you're inventing, don't borrow a problem from the future for today sufficient to today or the problems of today.
From Mark.
Michael, I think you were off base when you criticized Megan Rapinoe for saying, I deserve this, when she won the soccer game.
I'm not a fan of Megan.
She and her team had just won the World Woman's Cup and was basking in that glory.
That did look like an alcoholic beverage in her hand.
I suspect that her statement was more from an ego fulfilled than from leftism.
She just won big time.
Love the commentary.
Keep up the great work.
Mark.
I agree with you that what she was doing was fulfilling her own ego.
I'm just saying that's wrong, and it's especially wrong in sports.
It's unsportsmanlike.
You're not supposed to do that.
At the end of a game, you're supposed to go around and say, good game to everybody.
You're supposed to be humble.
You're supposed to obviously take some joy in your achievement.
You're supposed to succeed.
You're supposed to win.
But then you're not supposed to just talk about how great you are and say, I deserve this, I deserve this.
She wasn't joking.
You can sort of joke about I'm the greatest.
Muhammad Ali sometimes would joke about it.
I'm the greatest.
But there was a real wit.
There was a real cleverness.
She didn't have wit or cleverness.
She said, I deserve this.
She doesn't deserve this.
She won a sports game for a variety of reasons, some of which are her own talent, which she doesn't deserve.
She was just given her talent, some of which is her skill, which she has worked on and developed over time, some of which are the circumstances of the people she was playing with and the people that she was playing against.
Say thank you.
Say good game to the other guys.
Say I'm really glad we won.
Say it's really cool that I get to hold this trophy.
Say I'm so grateful to this country that they would allow me to represent them, to have this great feat.
But I deserve this?
You don't deserve anything.
What you're saying is it's not about leftism.
It's about ego fulfilled.
Leftism is ego fulfilled.
I mean they actually celebrate pride.
It's all just me, me, me.
I deserve this.
I deserve that.
That is what it is.
You're completely right, but that's leftism and that's no good.
From Michael.
Hey, Michael.
It's Michael.
Hi, Michael.
Out of all in the Daily Wire, cheers to you for having the best show.
That's very kind.
Thank you very much.
Feel free to gloat.
Well, I'm not Megan Rapinoe, so maybe I won't.
Anyways, how do you react when there are things that are personally challenging for your faith, whether that be history or doctrine?
Good question.
History doesn't challenge my faith.
One, because the history of Christianity is extraordinarily misrepresented in the pop culture.
And as someone who spent even a few moments skimming through the history, you can just point out the glaring historical inaccuracies that people regularly point to.
You know, the Crusades is the worst event in the history of the world or something like that.
So the history wouldn't bother me though even if it were true because people are fallen and institutions are imperfect and that's just not only is history imperfect and flawed but so is the present and so will be the future.
That doesn't challenge my faith at all.
Actually my faith tells us that.
My faith tells us the poor will always be with us.
My faith tells me take up your cross and bear it.
So, that's fine.
The doctrinal aspects are actually one of the reasons why I'm Catholic and why I like the Catholic Church quite a lot is because...
Despite all of the many, many immense problems over the millennia in the Catholic Church, the weight of their history, the inertia of that institution, has, I think, protected it from a lot of the doctrinal craziness that we're now seeing in some of my other friends' churches, where they've got pride flags outside of the church, or they're...
Changing doctrine willy-nilly or they're radically changing views of the human person and marriage and abortion and life and all of these things.
It's not to say that there aren't a lot of Catholics who do want to change those things.
It's just that the institution of the church has prevented them from doing it because it's so old and has so much history.
Even the popes can't change doctrine.
Popes are very fallible when they're trying to change doctrine.
So it doesn't present many challenges.
I do have a lot of questions about the faith.
I mean, I don't know even one drop in the ocean of what the faith is.
I don't comprehend even one iota of the faith.
But 10,000 problems or 10,000 questions doesn't make one doubt, as I believe John Henry Newman said.
From Nick, Hey, Eric Swalwell.
I'm sorry you had to drop out of the presidential race.
Me too.
Since you've acted in plays, I'm curious, what's your favorite work of Shakespeare if you had to pick one?
Personally, I don't think it gets any better than Hamlet.
But what is your pick and why?
You're absolutely right, Nick.
The answer is Hamlet.
I think it's the greatest play ever written.
And the reason for that...
I mean, there's a reason why it is considered the greatest play ever written and why it's done all the time.
Because it is...
So powerfully, broadly, and profoundly human.
And because the play is about a question that interests me very much, which is the history of Western Christendom, particularly in light of the Protestant Revolution.
So the play is really all about the Protestant Revolution and the points that the Protestant revolutionaries were making and the problems of the Catholic Church and the points that the Catholic Church were making and what it means for Europe that Christianity had this big split in Western Europe.
And even early on, Gertrude, the mother of Hamlet, says, don't go to Wittenberg, don't Don't go to the center of Protestantism.
You have Hamlet debating throughout the whole play doctrines of the faith.
From the very beginning, we see the soul of Hamlet's father is coming out from purgatory.
Many Protestants doubt the existence of purgatory.
Later on, Hamlet doubts the existence of purgatory.
These questions are being debated throughout the whole play, and those are the questions that really are animating the modern era from, say, 1500 to the present.
And so we're seeing them work out there.
Unfortunately, the end of Hamlet is not terribly uplifting.
That probably gives you a preview of what we're in store for in modern Western Christendom.
But, you know, it tells the story at least, and that's the purpose of art.
All right, one last question.
Let's see, one last question here.
I'll go down.
I want like a good question.
Okay, here we go.
From Kurt.
Hey, Covfefe.
I enjoy the show.
What advice would you give to applicants who feel they have a disadvantage in today's world for being a white male?
Would you suggest they describe themselves as Native American following the footsteps of Elizabeth Warren?
Thanks, Matt.
Well, you could honestly say that.
You could say that I'm a Native American.
Native means born.
From birth.
And American is American.
I'm American from birth.
I'm a Native American.
That's it.
So I could put that down in my college essay, though I don't do it.
It is true that right now there are laws on the books that discriminate against white people and Asians, for instance, affirmative action in college admissions.
There is a sort of sense in the popular culture that being white is a bad thing.
You heard Ayanna Pressley make that derogatory comment about white women before.
She's a member of Congress with no pushback whatsoever from the media.
Beyond race, on sex, there is a sense that men are awful.
They talk about toxic masculinity.
Women do everything better than men.
Men are terrible knuckle-dragging people who don't deserve due process or consideration of their opinions.
Yeah, that's all frustrating and stupid.
I don't like to complain about it too much.
I mean, I like to call attention to it.
I like to fight it.
But I don't want to whine and complain.
You know, everybody's got a problem and that's ours.
It's a line from Tennessee Williams' play, Orpheus Descending.
He's a vagabond guy who wants to spend the night at a woman's house.
And she says, no.
He says, I got nowhere to go.
And she says, well, everybody's got a problem and that's yours.
I mean, people have problems historically in the grand scheme of things.
Having the Hollywood and the mainstream media go against you isn't the biggest one.
Also suffering can be sanctifying, so if you do it nobly, if you respond to suffering in a dignified way, that is good for your soul and it's good for society.
I wouldn't try to cheat it.
I wouldn't try to get around it.
I would just honestly say, I am who I am.
I'm not ashamed of the circumstances of my birth.
Neither are you.
I would point out the I would go on with my life and laugh at all of their craziness because they're the ones who seem to be so upset and angry and crazed all the time and I think you and I are having a great time because politics has never been more fun.
Alright, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you next week.
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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