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July 18, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:27
Ep. 384 - Send Her Back? Make Her Speaker!

A crowd at a Trump rally chants to send comically villainous, anti-American congresswoman Ilhan Omar back to her native country. We’ll cut through the hysteria. Then, Prince Charles predicts the end of the world, Berkeley outlaws sexist words like “man-hole,” and finally the Mailbag! Date: 07-18-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A crowd at a Trump rally chants to send comically villainous anti-American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar back to her native country.
The usually excitable suspects lose their minds on the left, right, and center.
Meanwhile, President Trump has already disavowed the chant.
We will cut through the hysteria and examine why not only should we not send Omar back, We should make her Speaker of the House.
Then, the UK's Prince Charles predicts the end of the world in just, bum bum bum, 18 months.
And Berkeley outlaws sexist words like manhole.
Finally, The Mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
No more manholes.
It's 2019, people.
Come on.
We've got to get to the biggest news.
Not just the biggest news of the day, the biggest news of the century, the biggest news in the history of American politics.
People at a Trump rally chanted, send her back.
To an awful, villainous, anti-American congresswoman.
And then President Trump disavowed the remarks.
But this is the biggest news.
It's awful.
It's the Third Reich.
Nazism.
The left, right, and center.
People are losing their minds over this chant because nobody has any sense of proportion anymore in politics and everybody is extremely excitable.
So, what happened in the rally?
President Trump went after Ilhan Omar, as well he should have, because she's singularly awful and she's anti-American.
It all started out well.
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So Trump goes after Ilhan Omar, as he should have.
It started out very well.
Here's what he said.
Some people did something.
I don't think so much.
Some people did something.
Yeah, some people did something.
All right.
She pleaded for compassion for ISIS recruits attempting to join the terrorist organization.
She was looking for compassion.
Omar laughed that Americans speak of al-Qaeda in a menacing tone and remarked that, you don't say America with this intensity.
You say Al Qaeda makes you proud.
Al Qaeda makes you proud.
You don't speak that way about America.
And at a press conference just this week, when asked whether she supported Al Qaeda, that's our enemy.
That's our enemy.
They are a very serious problem that we take care of, but they always seem to come along somewhere.
She refused to answer.
She didn't want to give an answer to that question.
All completely true.
So far, so good.
He should campaign on this until election day in 2020.
Absolutely right.
Then, and this is what has everyone losing their minds, heads exploding, the crowd briefly chanted, send her back.
Here's the crowd.
Send her back!
Now, if you can't see the clip, you've got to look at Trump's face here.
Usually when he hears these chants, lock her up, USA, make America great again, he's got a big beaming smile, he's encouraging it, he's saying it too.
Not the case with this chant.
In this chant, he actually looks a little angry.
He's got this frown, he's not budging a muscle, he's not intoning anything, he's not encouraging it.
Which is important when you see his reaction to it this morning.
So according to the mainstream media, the left, even many conservatives, and I'm specifically talking about those conservatives who all they want to do is prove to the left that they're not racist or sexist or bigoted or this phobic or that phobic.
That's all they want.
All they want is to make sure the New York Times doesn't say anything mean about them.
According to these people, This is the single most horrific event in American history.
It doesn't get any worse than this.
Forget about slavery, Jim Crow, the Dred Scott decision.
Forget about terrorist attacks.
Forget about the wars that we've...
No, Pearl Harbor.
No, no, no.
This is the worst event.
Because a crowd briefly chanted, send her back to an immigrant who speaks with sympathy of Al-Qaeda.
Everybody needs to take a breath.
Justin Amash, the former Republican who wants to impeach Trump and he left the GOP, he was tweeting out all of this hysteria this morning.
I just responded to him.
I said, calm down.
It's okay.
Take a breath.
First thing, Ilhan Omar is a comically villainous figure in politics.
She giggles about Al-Qaeda.
She equates Al-Qaeda with the United States and England and the US Army.
She equates Al-Qaeda terrorists with U.S. soldiers, laughs about it on camera.
She begged a judge to give leniency to ISIS terrorists.
She's one of only a couple legislators to vote against denying insurance benefits to the families of terrorists.
She explicitly refused to condemn al-Qaeda at a press conference this week.
And that's all apart from the regular Jew hatred that she spouts.
That's not even taking into account the things that she has tweeted about Al-Qaeda and Jews in America.
That's just what she's, or rather, the things that she's tweeted about Israel and Jews in America.
That's just talking about what she said about Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and terrorists.
It is perfectly understandable why people would want to send her back.
A perfectly understandable passion.
Also, the chant is ugly.
It's not a nice chant.
We don't want to see that in America.
Send her back to immigrants who are U.S. citizens.
And it's politically counterproductive.
Those things can be true at the same time.
It can be totally understandable, the impulses.
She can be completely villainous and awful, and also that chant is ugly and we don't like it, and it doesn't ring very nicely in America, and politically it's counterproductive to the people who are chanting it.
Well, here's the good news, folks.
President Trump has already disavowed the chant, as well he should.
Here's President Trump this morning.
When your supporters last night were chanting, send her back, why didn't you stop them?
Why didn't you ask them to stop saying that?
Well, number one, I think I did.
I started speaking very quickly.
It really was a loud...
I disagree with it, by the way.
But it was quite a chant.
And I felt a little bit badly about it.
But I will say this.
I did, and I started speaking very quickly.
But it started up rather fast, as you probably noticed.
So you'll tell your supporters never to say that?
I would say that.
I was not happy with it.
I disagree with it.
There it is.
Simple.
Simple as can be.
You know, the thing that the mainstream media and the left and the anti-Trump conservatives, just the minute that any news story could possibly reflect poorly on Trump, they pounce on it.
They love it.
It's like their favorite thing.
This is actually the only time conservatives do pounce.
Conservatives generally don't pounce, despite what the mainstream media said.
But some anti-Trump conservatives, the minute a syllable leaves Trump's mouth or one of his supporters' mouths, they take to Twitter, they say, this is the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world.
It's okay.
It was an ugly chant.
It is the sort of thing we don't want to hear in America.
And Trump disavowed it.
Why didn't you disavow it in the moment?
Well, what is Trump going to do in the moment?
He's going to say, don't ever say that.
Basically what they want is this moment that John McCain had in 2008, where he tells his supporters that they're awful and they're bigots.
What the left wants is for Republicans to campaign like twice-failed presidential candidate John McCain.
That's what they keep saying.
John McCain was just trending on Twitter.
Why can't Republicans campaign like the twice-failed presidential candidate John McCain?
I can't imagine why you'd want us to campaign like that.
So he didn't.
Trump didn't humiliate his supporters.
He didn't insult his supporters in the moment.
He did pick up the speech.
He didn't participate in it.
And then this morning he said, I didn't like it.
I disagreed with it.
I felt kind of bad about it.
Great way to handle it.
You're not setting yourself up in opposition to your supporters.
You're sort of gently chiding them and making clear you don't want it to happen again.
Great.
That's wonderful.
What does the chant really mean?
And we'll get to that in a second.
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So this is good.
This seems like the right thing.
President Trump rightly attacked Ilhan Omar.
His supporters, some of his supporters went too far.
They chanted something ugly and politically unproductive.
He gently rebuked them for it.
All right, good.
It's over.
This all happened within the span of, what, 10 hours?
Great.
Now, what does the chant mean?
I don't think anyone is really calling on her to strip her of her citizenship and deport her.
I think people are expressing their frustration that we have an anti-American terrorist apologist in the U.S. Congress.
And that's a real...
A real frustration.
I also suspect very few people actually want to give the President of the United States the authority to strip citizens of their citizenship and deport them at will.
So what the statement is doing is expressing moral disapproval of Ilhan Omar's egregious actions.
And a lot of people are being disingenuous here.
The Washington Post tweeted out last night, they said, quote, Trump's accusation is that Rep.
Omar sympathizes with al-Qaeda terrorists.
We found no evidence for that claim.
Fortunately, I have found no evidence for the claim that the Washington Post is a credible newspaper.
I did, however, find evidence of Ilhan Omar expressing sympathy for al-Qaeda and speaking in a very strange and giggly way about al-Qaeda.
Here's the evidence.
The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said al-Qaeda, he sort of, like, his shoulders went up.
Yeah, he's in command here.
Al-Qaeda, you know, hospital.
He's an expert.
You don't say America with an intensity.
You don't say England with an intensity.
You know, you don't say the army with an intensity.
CARE was founded after 9-11.
Because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.
Can you respond to some of the president's specific claims, most notably that you're a communist and that you're pro-Al-Qaeda?
I think it is beyond time.
It's beyond time.
To ask Muslims to condemn terrorists.
We are no longer going to allow the dignification of such ridiculous, ridiculous statement.
Hey, Washington Post, I found your evidence.
Also, I mean, this isn't on video.
This is just in the newspapers.
Ilhan Omar asked for leniency for terrorists.
She voted to let terrorist families keep insurance money from their terrorist family members.
And she almost certainly committed immigration fraud by marrying her brother.
So she's absolutely awful.
The conservatives pretending that this is the worst thing that's ever happened also are being disingenuous here.
President Trump didn't lead the chant.
He didn't participate in the chant.
He didn't encourage the chant.
The chant was over quickly, and then he disavowed the chant.
It's fine.
It's ugly.
It's bad.
The thing that's so counterproductive about it is it almost makes her sympathetic, which is virtually impossible to do because she's so villainous.
So that should be discouraged.
Where Trump bears responsibility here.
I mean, I thought he handled the chant and the aftermath as well as he possibly could have.
Where he bears some responsibility is he could have avoided this, almost certainly, by being more precise in the wording of his tweet.
So he sent out that tweet, and instead of saying, if you don't love America, leave America, which is the sentiment he was more or less expressing, instead he said...
He was implying that these four women should go back to their home countries, even though three of them are from America.
And so if the tweet had said, America, love it or leave it, go spend time in countries that aren't so great, come back here and then tell us why our country is even worse, that would have worked.
So he's the leader.
He started this meme of the send her back.
Now he's dealing with the fallout of that.
And he course-corrected He did course correct, but he's got to keep hammering that home, and he does bear some responsibility, and it should give him pause, just not to create the political headache for himself of...
Maybe way to beat.
You know, you write out the tweet.
It looks like a really good tweet.
Just double check it.
Just hit it from a few more angles.
Try to be a little bit more precise.
Because if he had been a little more precise in his language, this would have been a knockout political attack.
And I think it's still fine.
I don't think the sky is falling.
But it just could have been, he could have made it easier for himself.
Also, and this is the point I want to drive home to the people who had been chanting.
We don't want to send her back.
We don't.
She is the greatest gift to conservatives.
Not even since AOC, she's a greater gift to conservatives than AOC. Because AOC just kind of seems like a buffoon.
In some ways, she's sort of sympathetic because she seems unintelligent.
Ilhan Omar doesn't seem unintelligent.
She just seems wicked and she giggles about Al-Qaeda and she equates Muslim terrorists with U.S. soldiers.
I mean, that is a...
There's no comparison there.
So we shouldn't send her back.
We should make her the Speaker of the House.
We should make her the leader of the Democrats for life.
We should make every Democrat rally behind her, which was the effect of the tweet that Trump sent in the first place.
We should encourage that.
Now, speaking of the sky actually falling...
I have to get to really bad news coming out of the United Kingdom and the royal family.
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So head over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe today to Apollo 11, what we saw an incredible way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing this Saturday.
Do you remember when AOC told us six months ago that we only had 12 months left to live?
We're like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.
And your biggest issue is...
Your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it?
And, like, this is the war.
This is our World War II. Okay, so this is our World War II. This is the end of the world in 12 years.
According to Prince Charles, this situation is way worse.
According to Prince Charles, AOC was off by 10 and a half years.
Actually, we only have 18 months left before we reach a tipping point and the world cannot be saved.
Prince Charles just recently said this, quote, I'm firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.
Now this is Particularly bad news because in 2015, just four years ago, Prince Charles said that we had 35 years left before we reached that tipping point.
So I don't know what happened in the past four years, but apparently things have gotten way, way worse.
And we should note in Charles's defense...
The 35 years prediction only came after his 2009 prediction where he warned that we only had 100 months left to save the planet, which by that measure means that we passed the point of no return in 2017, which means that there's nothing we can do anymore, which means I guess we should probably just live it up because the world is already doomed.
Is that right?
Something like that?
No, because now we have another 18 months.
I wonder how much more time we'll have in 18 months when the world doesn't end and Prince Charles tells us we have another 10 months or another 10 years or who knows.
It's almost as if all of these alarmist warnings are arbitrary and disingenuous emotional manipulation to try to affect the same leftist policies that these people have been pushing for 100 years, most of which have nothing to do with the environment.
They have been doing this forever.
Here's what the left does.
They tell everyone that the world is about to end.
Then they tell everyone that luckily they have the one solution that can prevent the world from ending.
And then they tell everyone that because there's really no time left, we just have to embrace their solution without asking any questions, without thinking about it too much, and then that's the only way we can save the world.
But if we wait and we think about it, then the world is going to end.
We have to do it really, really quickly.
I remember this, watching An Inconvenient Truth, that Al Gore movie in 2006.
Even I, watching that movie, When he came to the end, he said, the whole world's going to end, but it's not too late.
We still have, like, five seconds to do something as long as you do exactly what I tell you to do.
They always end it with that.
We can still do something as long as you embrace exactly what I want right now.
And even I walked out of there thinking, gosh, maybe he's right.
Maybe, I don't know.
I mean, what was I? I was 16 at the time.
I was emotionally manipulated by that movie, which is what they are all doing.
The left wants us to adopt these policies quickly because they don't want us to think about them.
Most of the Green New Deal has nothing to do with the environment.
It's about redistributing wealth to Native American tribes.
What does that have to do with the environment?
It's about exploring reparations.
It has nothing to do with the environment.
It's about universal socialist health care.
Again, nothing to do with the environment.
But we have to do it quickly because if we reflect on the policies...
We'll realize that we're being scammed.
So they can't let us reflect on them.
The other reason we have to do it quickly is because if we think about it long enough, we'll remember that all of their other doomsday predictions didn't come true.
Right?
So now we have 18 months.
2015, we had 35 years.
2009, we had only 100 months, which means the world passed the tipping point in 2017.
But no, it didn't really.
We got some extra time.
We got an extra, what, three and a half years, something.
But we got to do it now.
Every one of these.
Al Gore said New York City would be completely underwater by now.
Didn't happen.
Florida would be completely underwater by now.
Didn't happen.
None of these things.
The population bomb in the 1970s.
If we don't dramatically decrease the world's population, abortion, contraception, if we don't do that, then we're all going to die.
We're wealthier today than any time in history.
Way wealthier than we were in the 1970s, and we have way, way more people.
It was just totally debunked.
Remember in the 70s, global cooling was going to lead to a new ice age, unless we embrace their policies.
Now global warming is going to lead to a new hell on earth, unless we embrace their policies.
How many times have they been proven wrong?
So I have a deal.
If they ever are proven right on their predictions, on their doomsday prophecies, then maybe I'll start to listen to them.
Then maybe I'll start to worry.
Until then, not so much.
Speaking of things, by the way, even crazier than Prince Charles' doomsday predictions.
The city of Berkeley is banning gendered language from government.
Of course it's happening in Berkeley, California.
No policemen.
Only police officers.
No chairman.
Only chair people.
No manpower.
No way can you say manpower.
Only human effort.
That's the new politically correct term.
No manholes.
Now it's maintenance holes.
Frankly, I think maintenance is a little too close to man for my liking, but I guess it's a progressive step in the right direction.
No more he or she.
They won't use pronouns anymore, singular pronouns in the Berkeley City government.
Only the singular they, like they is drinking from the leftist tears tumbler.
They likes tears.
That's what we've reduced our language to.
This is significant.
The council member there, Rigel, I think that's how you pronounce his name, I don't know, Rigel Robinson said, quote, there's power in language.
This is a small move, but it matters.
And he's absolutely right.
He's being completely honest.
These little small moves in language matter a lot.
That's why the left fights so hard to change them.
That's why there are 0.2% of the population, if that, is confused about their biological sex and...
We've spent years now debating whether we can say he or she or we have to use the singular they, which is an assault on the English language.
Because it radically changes our understanding of reality in the past.
When you use language, the kind of language you use radically changes how you think of reality.
For instance, the reason they do the pronoun battle is if I hear about A transgender girl beats a girl at a high school track meet.
I think, okay, well a transgender girl who is a type of girl beats a different girl who's another type of girl at a track meet.
That seems fair.
But if I use accurate language and I say, a boy in a dress beats a girl at a high school track meet, I'll become aware of the injustice of that.
Because men are physically stronger than women and they're faster than women.
I'll say, oh, that's not fair.
That's wrong.
I don't think that boy in a dress should be able to take a scholarship away from a girl at a girl's track meet.
I think the boy should compete with the boys, and the girl should compete with the girls.
So they have to change the language, because if I just say she to refer to the boy in the dress, if I just say transgender girl, even though I am aware of what that means, I'm explicitly talking about that, the image in my mind is of a girl, and that's what language does.
He then goes on, this city councilman, Rye Joel Robinson, quote, Here he's completely wrong.
It's not male-centric.
Man...
Can refer to a man, like me, or it can refer to mankind, which is gender neutral.
In the book of Genesis, it reads, God created man, comma, both male and female.
He created them.
There is male and female of man, because we're talking about mankind.
When...
The Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon.
Neil Armstrong said, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
There's that distinction there between a man, which is Neil Armstrong, and man referring to mankind.
You don't have to say humankind.
You don't have to say people kind.
Man can be gender neutral as well.
But the singular they, by the way, the singular they already exists.
When people say, instead of saying, hey, call your friend, see if they want to come hang out.
People already use this, and we do it because we're so timid about sex in our society, because you know that if you say something that is true, but politically incorrect, like referring to a man who thinks he's a woman as a man, you will be kicked off of Twitter.
You violated the rules.
If you're in school, you'll be called into the principal's office.
If you're at work, you'll be called into HR. So we use they, not because it's correct or grammatical, but because it's just easier.
It's just easier for us not to have to fight.
The they suggests many other things.
It suggests, among them, that there is no difference between the sexes.
He or she, just they is fine.
It suggests maybe there are more than two biological sexes.
Robinson, in his line, he referred to non-binary people.
Non-binary.
Now there are people who are hermaphrodites or intersex who have ambiguous genitals or even ambiguous chromosomes.
Those people represent at most 0.05% of the population.
0.05%.
99.95% of the population is either male or female.
But if we alter our language to only focus on the 0.05% rather than the 99.95%, we create the impression that many, if not most people, are non-binary, which is just a bizarre fiction.
And it's this particularly leftist fiction, and it's a particularly liberal fiction, and it's a particularly modern fiction.
The story of modernity is the story of emancipation.
Liberation.
That's what we talk about.
Everybody talks about that.
We emancipate ourselves from all forms of oppression.
And this initially means political oppression.
Oppression which one perceives from a king, let's say.
Then it's emancipating yourself from social oppression.
The oppression of your town or your community or your family even.
Then it's emancipating yourself from moral oppression.
Don't slut shame me.
Don't shame me.
I'm going to embrace pride.
I'm going to deny the existence of a moral law because if there's a moral law then someone's telling me what to do and that's oppressive.
This now comes down to a natural emancipation, an emancipation from the natural biological sorts of oppression.
We're trying to emancipate ourselves from our very nature, not just aspects of human nature like our fallenness, our brokenness, our greed, our ambition, our envy, or our overambition rather, but Actually from our biology, saying, I am not even to be oppressed by my own body.
Even my own body oppresses me.
We're emancipating ourselves from ourselves.
And ironically, this means emancipating ourselves from all distinction, all variety, all diversity.
There can't even be men and women.
Everybody has to be the same.
And it only leaves this boring and ironically oppressive sameness, homogeneity.
It's just all exactly the same.
This is the totalitarian vision, this sameness.
This is what's imagined in every dystopian novel.
In every dystopian vision, people are all kind of just wearing gray.
They all kind of look the same.
They all speak the same.
If you contradict the totalitarian regime, you're liquidated.
You're taken out.
You just have to say the same things, think the same things, look exactly the same way.
And it's no surprise that Berkeley, California, left of Lenin, is leading the charge in its language.
Speaking of language, we've got to get some mailbag questions coming in.
But first...
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A gift from me, much, much more.
It's a lot of fun.
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Right now, we'll be right back with the mailbag.
All right.
The first question from Jonah.
Dear Eric Swalwell, What are your thoughts on Facebook censoring a St.
Augustine quote, and do you think that Facebook will ever stop trying to censor conservative and Christian voices?
Hashtag came for Ben, stayed for Michael.
Jonah, age 16.
This is a story.
We actually didn't get time to cover it this week.
Facebook censored a quote, not from some awful bigot, not from even some conservative political figure.
Which they try to do frequently.
They censored a quote from one of the fathers of the church and one of the greatest saints of history, St.
Augustine.
And this is the quote.
Let us never assume that if we live good lives, we will be without sin.
Our lives should be praised only when we continue to beg for pardon.
But men are hopeless creatures, and the less they concentrate on their own sins, the more interested they become in the sins of others.
They seek to criticize, not to correct.
Unable to excuse themselves, they are ready to accuse others.
This is obviously a true quote.
I mean, this is the essence of the Lord's Prayer.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
It's the idea that before you take the speck out of your brother's eye, you should pull the plank out of your own eye.
Obviously, we're a culture right now that...
Facebook totally focuses on everybody else's problems, never on our own.
We always judge everyone else on their actions.
We judge ourselves on our intentions, never on our actions, because then we have to admit that we screw up all the time.
Facebook is not going to stop doing that.
Facebook is now in the business of censoring the truth.
Social media now will ban you if you state simple facts.
Men are not women.
Very basic things.
And so they're always going to come after the truth.
If you don't celebrate pride...
I mean, what Christian wants to celebrate pride?
It's the queen of all sins.
Deadliest sin.
So, no, they're not going to stop it.
They're going to go after those people who state simple moral truths.
I mean, Christ told us this.
He said that we will be hated for his sake.
And that it's actually a good thing to be hated for his sake.
Look what they did to him!
Obviously, the culture, not just this culture, but all cultures, all human society is in some ways going to persecute followers of Christ, and this is just another example of that.
And I can't believe it, but they're going after St.
Augustine, what, 1,700 years after the man lived?
That's, I guess, to be expected.
From Brett.
Greetings, Kofethe Sensei.
If a man receives a gender reassignment surgery, hormone therapy, plastic surgery, and a successful functioning uterus to carry children, do they have a legitimate claim to say that they are a woman?
No.
I guess we could end the question there.
No, they're not.
They resemble women.
In some ways, they function like women, but they are not women.
And what we're confusing is a kind of utilitarian, functional definition of what a woman is to what sex actually means.
So women aren't just sort of machines and vessels for bearing children.
They're not just instruments for our own pleasure.
I mean, these days we treat them that way.
That's what the surrogate movement is all about, is basically paying desperate women to carry our babies because we don't want to do it ourselves or we can't do it ourselves.
But women are not just instruments for our own desires.
Women are human beings with equal dignity.
That's why the sexual difference between men and women comes in the first few chapters of Genesis.
It's why the sexual difference between men and women is the essence of the story of Gilgamesh, another foundational story of human nature.
It's why it's true of every foundational story of mankind.
Sexual difference is foundational to who we are.
And speaking of Genesis, it's why Eve is plucked from Adam's rib.
She's not plucked from his head.
She's not superior to Adam.
She's not plucked from his feet.
She's not inferior to Adam.
She's plucked from his ribs.
She has equal dignity to Adam.
And you can't change that.
You can't change your sex, which is so foundational.
It is a part of who you are.
You can't just change it By getting cosmetic surgery.
You can't even just change it by turning yourself in some scientific future into a plausible vessel for carrying children.
It goes deeper than that.
I mean, the scientific example today would be it goes down to our chromosomes and spiritually and metaphysically that tells us just how essential sexual difference is even to our spirit.
From Joshua.
What are some musicals that you have enjoyed?
I find it more difficult these days to find non-PC ones.
Yeah, musicals these days are pretty bad.
I don't really go see many.
My favorite musical is Guys and Dolls, one of the all-time great musicals.
Speaking of gender difference, you probably can't even do that today because it suggests that there are such things as Guys and Dolls.
But I love it.
It was the first musical I ever did when I was a kid.
I'll let you guess which role I played.
And it's just one of the great ones, you know, and there's a great film adaptation of it with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, and it takes place in New York.
There's wonderful music to it.
It's fun.
It's not trying to be more than it is.
These days, musicals tend to have this kind of PC social justice aspect.
But that's because musicals are dead.
So musicals really thrived in the middle of the 20th century.
Think of all those great musicals of the 40s through the 60s.
And then they kind of died.
I mean, there were some good ones since then, but just not very many.
And it's true of the movies.
You know, there were great movies, and then the movies died, and now the movies are all just regurgitating ideological messages.
Art forms are born, they rise, and they die, and that's what happened to musicals.
From Tony.
Do you think that President Trump has a punk rock appeal that is going to help the conservative movement win the younger generation?
Tony.
He does, in a certain sense.
Millennials hate his guts.
I noticed that Gen Z seems to like him a little bit more than millennials do because Gen Z is cooler than millennials.
He does have a punk rock appeal in that he's contrarian.
He bucks the pop culture.
He bucks what all of the scolds of the mainstream media and the mainstream culture are telling him to do.
So I think that's cool.
I don't know that it's going to win him young voters today, though.
I think it's going to win him young voters retrospectively.
You know, I'm old enough to remember when George Bush was Hitler.
Now everyone longs for George Bush.
All the Democrats love George Bush.
I mean, they did call him Hitler.
They drew swastikas over his face and gave him little mustaches when he was in office.
But now he's a great guy.
And I'm old enough to remember when they did that to John McCain, when he was running for president and failed to win.
And so they're doing it to Trump now.
In the future, though, people are going to cool off.
And they're going to realize that Trump wasn't Hitler.
And then we're going to look at the history of it.
And we're going to see that things really did pretty well under President Trump.
As far as all the evidence we have right now, things are doing great.
The economy is doing great.
Our diplomatic relations are doing great.
Much better than they were under Barack Obama.
Things are pretty good.
And I think that the punk rock appeal is going to be, in retrospect, we're going to say, man, that guy didn't listen to what all the egghead experts were telling him, and he did it his own way, and he listened to the American people, and he respected them, and things turned out better.
And it's in many ways how Ronald Reagan became a saint.
When Reagan was in office, a lot of conservatives didn't like him.
Bill Buckley liked him at the National Review, but a lot of the rest of that kind of self-appointed conservative movement intelligentsia didn't really care for him.
I mean, they would joke.
Some people put on the door of the RNC in 1984, draft Bush, because they didn't want Reagan to even run again.
And in retrospect, though, because Reagan, in many ways like Trump, Bucked the establishment, bucked established norms, and most importantly, because he was successful, he became a model of what a Republican should be and what a Republican should behave like with regard to the mainstream culture.
So I could see that happening with Trump.
We're just going to need a few years after he leaves office for that to settle in.
From Blake.
Michael, as a published author on Democratic politics, in your expert opinion, who do you think will pick up Beto's 0.0% of the vote when he drops out?
Thanks, Blake.
Great question, because Beto's polling numbers have a lot in common with the word count of my book, A Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide.
Both of those word counts are, they thoroughly describe the appeal of Beto and of the Democratic Party.
So I suspect that his 0.0% is going to go to Eric Swalwell.
Obviously, he's my preferred candidate.
And I actually think that 0.0% has already gone to Eric Swalwell.
So I think that prediction also was correct.
From Brayden.
Hi, Michael.
I have friends that I share Daily Wire episodes with, and they listen and they say back to me that some of it they agree with, but much of it is opinionated statements that aren't based on facts.
They say, you don't mention truthfully what the other side really thinks, acknowledging what the more moderate Democrats, the ones that don't get media attention, are saying.
What do you think about this?
Thanks, Braden.
Well, those are two criticisms, so you've got to separate them out.
On one, they're saying that what I say isn't based on facts.
And then the second criticism is that I don't show the more moderate Democrats.
So for the first one, when they say that, they say, what you're saying isn't based on facts.
It's very simple.
You should ask them to refute what I'm saying.
Now, part of what I suspect their confusion is, is that they don't know what an opinion is, because a lot of people don't know what opinions are.
People think that there are facts, which are factual, and then opinions, which are not factual.
But that isn't true.
There are facts, which are factual.
There are opinions, which are statements of fact from an individual's point of view.
And then there's a third category called preferences.
Right?
Like, I prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate ice cream.
Here's an example.
Two plus two equals four.
That's a fact.
I think that two plus two equals four.
That's an opinion.
I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla.
That's a preference.
It's not based on a fact.
It's based on my own taste.
And about taste, there can be no disagreement.
There can't be arguing.
So I think people confuse that a little bit.
Just ask them with the facts.
Ask them, well, what fact do you have that refutes what these shows say?
As for not showing the more moderate Democrats, I think we do that.
I mean, I think when George Shultz was running for office, when he was briefly running for president...
I showed that a bunch, and I said, here are some of the Democrats, but here's why they're being overshadowed.
Actually, this whole week I've been talking about how the more moderate, and I put that in quotes because the Democratic Party actually objectively has moved much further to the left, so there aren't really that many moderates anymore.
There used to be what were called blue dog Democrats, conservatives.
Now there are only a handful of them, like Joe Manchin from West Virginia.
But even relatively, because moderation is relative, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden now represent the kind of moderate wing of the party, and AOC and the squad represents the radical wing.
But we've been talking about that disagreement all week, so I just don't think that's a very fair criticism of the show.
If they think that there is some huge number of so-called moderate Democrats out there, and just accidentally, very few of them, if any, are running for president, and none of them are...
Are dominating the political conversation.
Please feel free to show me that huge number of moderate Democrats.
I haven't seen them.
From Grant.
Hey Michael, I recently read C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters and I thought it was a good start for my girlfriend to learn about Christian morals.
Turned out she didn't quite understand it.
Is this the right literature for that purpose or can you recommend something more digestible?
Keep up the great work.
Thanks.
Coincidentally...
I'm actually rereading the Screwtape Letters right now.
And it's one of the great books.
It's written as a series of letters from a demon, from a little devil, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood.
And so he's talking about all the different ways that these devils and demons can go out and steal the souls from God.
Now, obviously, it's written...
Ironically, he's exposing what the Christian moral view is from the negative, which I think is a really great and creative way to do that.
But it doesn't work for everybody, so if it doesn't work, what I would recommend is C.S. Lewis' other book, probably his most famous book, Mere Christianity.
I think that's just a fabulous introduction to Christianity.
It's not...
Terribly humorous.
It's not terribly creative.
I mean, it really gives a pretty basic introduction to Christianity, and it's very compelling, and it's theologically very advanced, but it can also be read by a three-year-old.
So I'd recommend that.
But I also highly recommend Screwtape, and that's why I'm rereading it again right now.
Alright, we've got more questions, but too bad.
Our show's over.
Head on over to The Daily Wire.
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We appreciate that.
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So check all that out.
Have a good weekend.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you on Monday.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Danny D'Amico.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on The Matt Wall Show, we're going to discuss...
Tribalistic demagoguery, which is a plague in our society, and it is leading us down a dark path, I believe.
Our leaders on both sides, many of them, are nothing but tribalistic demagogues, and they seem eager to encourage radicalism, chaos, civil unrest.
So we'll discuss that.
Also, Scarlett Johansson has run afoul of the PC mob.
And finally, a feminist devised one of the possibly maybe the dumbest invention of all time.
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