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Aug. 15, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:04
Ep. 399 - Big Tech Censorship Is All About 2020

A leftist bully goes down. We will examine what it means for 2020, particularly in light of a Google whistleblower's document dump. Then, Jeffrey Epstein’s autopsy reveals broken bones in his neck more consistent with homicide than suicide. Finally the Mailbag! Date: 08-15-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Chalk one up for the good guys.
Two months after leftist cry-bully Carlos Maza tried to get Steven Crowder and other conservatives thrown off of YouTube, it looks like Vox.com is firing him.
We talked yesterday about how conservatives should react to the political misfortunes of our political foes.
And of course, we should extend an olive branch, even to Carlos Maza, even to leftists who relentlessly seek to smear and silence us.
Tomorrow.
Today, however, we should laugh in his face.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
We win.
You lose, Carlos Maza.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
We will analyze what Vox's move means for 2020, particularly in light of a Google whistleblower's latest document dump on the tech giant's political interference efforts.
Then, sex trafficker and cartoonish supervillain Jeffrey Epstein's autopsy reveals broken bones in his neck that are more consistent with homicide than suicide.
Hmm.
We will examine for any Clintons watching why he still totally committed suicide, and this is all perfectly normal, and I don't know nothing.
I don't know nothing, I tell you!
Then, a quick look at 2020, finally the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Excellent news coming out of Vox.com.
That's the first time I've ever said that statement.
But there is excellent news, and it's even good news for big tech in 2020.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Really great product.
Really great news coming out of Vox.com.
Two and a half months after Carlos Maza tried to get Crowder and other conservatives, and obviously they were looking down the pike at us, trying to take them all off of YouTube, it appears, it's being reported right now, that Carlos Maza is being fired from Vox.com.
If you do not remember this insufferable leftist bully, here he is.
The stuff he was saying was not...
It had nothing to do with my political views.
He was calling me a lispy queer, and a sprite, and a fairy, and he called me a gay Mexican, and he would routinely make fun of the way that I spoke and just do gay impressions.
He made kind of gruesome sexual comments about me.
I hope that YouTube recognizes that the end result of this is not some happy medium.
It's a place where only bullies operate.
If the teacher never intervenes, the kids who are getting bullied at the playground will leave the playground, and that's what's happening to YouTube.
Truer words have never been spoken.
That's right.
It looked like the bullies were going to just run the whole internet.
The bullies, of course, not being Steven Crowder, the bullies being this jerk who's trying to silence all of his political opponents.
He was angry at Crowder for calling him gay and queer.
Do you know what this guy's personally selected Twitter handle is?
Gay wonk.
He calls himself gay all the time.
He calls himself queer all the time.
By the way, we've been told that queer is the new politically correct term.
It's in the acronym LGBTQ, used not only by gay people themselves, but also by straight politicians.
But only the good ones, only the progressive ones can use the term.
The conservative ones, if you use it, it's the same as the N-word.
I guess everything's the N-word these days.
Gay is the N-word, queer is the N-word, Fredo is the N-word.
I think the N-word is still the N-word.
Outrageous stuff trying to get us all kicked off.
Now it looks like he's going down, according to reports.
This was one of the first media guys to call Tucker Carlson a white supremacist.
I mean, in many ways, Carlos Maz is ahead of his time.
He is kind of leading the progressive political tactics.
He had in his Twitter bio, Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist.
He referred to himself as a Marxist.
Now all the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are not only calling Tucker Carlson a white supremacist, they're calling all of the Trump supporters, half of the country, conservatives and Republicans, referring to them as white nationalists and white supremacists.
I think Carlos Maze, I mean, I gotta give the devil his due, he recognized that the way that Democrats can avoid what happened in 2016, really the best way, if not the only way, that the left and Democrats can avoid the re-election of Donald Trump and keep on losing their races is...
By censoring their opponents.
That's the way.
The way to do it is because the left controls the flow of information around the internet because all of the big tech companies are decidedly, invariably leftist.
The way that they can do it is by censoring us, shutting us up, ruthlessly silencing conservatives on the internet.
And apparently this was too much even for Vox.
Carlos Maza flew a little bit too close to the sun.
And I think this is the right move for Vox to fire him.
The reason being, I called this at the time, I said, it's a bad look for a media company to censor their opponents.
It's a bad look for an outlet, a news outlet and a commentary outlet, to be trying to silence and censor other people.
Because you just look like such a hypocrite, you know, the...
Republic dies in darkness.
Democracy dies in darkness.
By the way, we need to darken the office buildings of every single one of our competitors.
Doesn't look good.
I mean, and the left also has operative organizations that exist to silence conservatives and to get all of us fired.
They have Media Matters, so they don't even need Vox.com to fill that gap.
I think as a business decision, as a journalistic decision, they had to fire this guy.
But this ties in with what we're talking about over here at Google.
I mean, I'm really glad that Carlos Maza is going down.
I am really glad that the timing works to prove my rule yesterday.
The rule I said yesterday is I don't want to jump on Fredo Cuomo for having a couple drinks and defending his honor at a restaurant or a beer garden or wherever he was.
I don't want to jump on Don Lemon because of just some allegations in a lawsuit.
I want to wait for the evidence.
I want to be measured.
I want to be reasonable.
I don't want people to be fired.
I don't want to censor my political opponents.
But the left won't play by those rules.
And there is nothing moral.
There is nothing nice.
There is nothing high-minded about unilaterally disarming and letting the left destroy our culture and politics.
There's nothing good about that.
I think there are some conservatives who think that by remaining above it all and not engaging with political realities, saying, well, I'm never going to get my hands dirty, that that's somehow good, that somehow is virtuous or moral.
It's not.
There's nothing good about letting guys like Carlos Maza totally destroy our culture and our government and our politics.
So I'm...
I'm glad that we're getting into this.
I'm glad that this guy's going down.
And I would be happy to extend grace to my political opponents, as the right has regularly done.
But they need to extend grace to us three times in a row.
Just three times in a row.
Some non-traversy comes up, some tweet or something, some, you know, they can go after Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or one of us or, I don't know, they could go after one of us and they choose not to.
If they do that once, that's a good start.
If they do it a second time, fine.
If they do it three times, I'm willing to extend grace to the left.
Until they do that, three times in a row, and by the way, I'm not just talking about random Twitter accounts or something.
I'm talking about these guys.
Vox.com is a huge outlet on the left.
The people who are out there, forward-facing, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, if they extend grace three times in a row, we'll extend grace to them.
If they don't, we're going to laugh in Carlos Maz's face.
We'll see what this means for big tech generally.
We'll see what it means for 2020.
And of course, we've got to get to the latest in the Epstein saga.
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So this ties in with what we're talking about on big tech generally.
There's a whistleblower from Google that just came out thanks to Project Veritas and James O'Keefe.
The whistleblower's name is Zachary Voorhees.
He delivered nearly a thousand pages of documents to the Department of Justice's antitrust division demonstrating that Google manipulated its algorithms In such a way that it biased its search engine results against conservatives, against Republicans, against Christians, all the people who are politically incorrect these days, Google was actively going out of their way to suppress them.
Here's the whistleblower.
I felt that our entire election system was going to be compromised forever by this company that told the American public that it was not going to do any evil.
This is the best thing that I can do in the situation that I'm currently at.
So this guy's coming out, he's revealing his face, he's revealing his voice, he's not even using one of those masks or anything like that.
He's coming out because he said that this was compromising our election system.
This is the greatest irony of the last three years of Russian collusion and the illegitimate election because the Democrats can't ever admit that they lost a presidential election.
They accused Republicans of cheating on the election.
There is no evidence that that happened whatsoever.
Not a zilch, nothing.
The left, however, did interfere in the election.
They did manipulate the election.
They did skirt FEC rules because they don't need to point out that when you have the largest companies that control the flow of internet information, when you have them working for one side of the political aisle, that is obviously an in-kind contribution that is worth millions and millions and millions of dollars, if not more, and they get to do it.
That is the election interference.
How do they do it?
They hit us from several angles.
First of all, they control the flow of information around the internet.
Google in particular.
Google is search.
That's it.
They've tried to make other search companies.
Google is search, right?
They do it when they don't just do it on Google, they do it on Facebook.
They do it on Twitter.
Obviously, they do it on YouTube.
YouTube is owned by Google.
Google owns the internet, so they control the flow of information.
If there's a story they don't want getting around, they can suppress it, and they regularly do.
One thing they did to us for a while is when you'd search for Daily Wire, you'd get a bunch of results of leftist organizations talking about how terrible we are.
Those would be some of the first results to come up.
So you Google it.
You say, okay, I want to hear about this story.
Oh, I can't trust Daily Wire because the organizations that Google is promoting don't like us.
So they control the information.
How else do they hit you?
They have all of your data.
Google owns your data.
So, every little thing you've ever typed in, every little weird search that you've put into that browser, you know what I'm talking about.
I know you look at some weird stuff on the internet.
I'm talking about stuff like the Michael Knowles show.
I'm talking about stuff like dailywire.com.
You look at some weird stuff.
Maybe you don't want that to get out there because you could lose your job and your reputation.
That is owned by Google.
There are no protections on that.
It's not like that's owned by the government.
There might not be protections on it even if it were.
But it's just a random corporation.
A super powerful corporation, a very leftist corporation that hates everything that you believe.
Not a good situation to be in, is it?
And then they can manipulate the appearance of reality itself.
This brings us to deep fakes.
I mean, we'll get to deep fakes in a second.
But that is too much power.
Google has too much power.
That's it.
They can alter our elections.
They can manipulate your data.
They have total leverage over you and what you think and all your deepest, darkest secrets and all your financial information and everything, photos of you.
And now they can manipulate the appearance of reality itself.
I love the deepfake story.
I mean, it's very...
If you haven't looked at deepfakes...
The New York Times is warning about it.
They say, deepfakes are coming.
We can no longer believe what we see.
This came out in the New York Times.
There is now technology that can so manipulate video that you can't even believe your own eyes.
We'll get to that in a second.
We'll get to the negative side of that, what that means for us and our privacy and our politics.
We'll also get to maybe A silver lining in all of that, but first I have to thank our friends at ExpressVPN.
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Deepfakes actually kind of take us to the logical conclusion of this big tech behemoth.
So, if you haven't seen or heard a deepfake, check this one out.
This is a deepfake of Barack Obama.
Looks almost exactly like him.
Frankly, it sounds almost exactly like him, too.
We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time, even if they would never say those things.
So, For instance, they could have me say things like, I don't know, Killmonger was right, or Ben Carson is in the sunken place, or how about this, simply, President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.
Now, you see, I would never say these things, at least not in a public address, but someone else would.
Someone like Jordan Peele.
There it is.
You can see it's Jordan Peele there, and he's the one who's just coming up with all of this monologue.
I mean, he's just a comedian, and he's coming up with this monologue.
The voice isn't perfect, but if the voice were a little bit better, it would be indistinguishable, because on the video features, the Obama's face, you almost, it's 99.9%, you couldn't tell that it's a fake video.
And there's a lot of alarm.
People are freaking out over this, because Talk about future dystopia.
Now you can't even believe what you see.
Some big tech giant could just make a fake video, and you wouldn't be able to separate the real video from reality.
I mean, we're within like two years of these being pretty much perfect.
I actually think it's a pretty good thing.
I think this is helpful to conservatives.
I think this is helpful to taking down some of this tyranny of big tech.
Everything today is on photo or on video.
Everything.
Everything you did.
The coffee you had this morning, the walk you took with your dog, your drive while you were Instagramming a story as you were driving and also recording something else.
Everything is out there.
And this is especially true for a generation that grew up with Facebook.
I was kind of right at the beginning of that.
We finally got Facebook when I was in 8th or 9th grade, I think.
And that was kind of the new thing.
Before that, we had MySpace.
Before that, we had Zanga.
Before that, we had LiveJournal.
So people were all uploading their photos and their information.
And now you have a whole generation that didn't exist without those kind of companies.
Everything is up there.
So I remember at the time, we were in high school, and I was thinking, gosh, when people run for office in 20 or 30 years from this generation, We're going to know everything they ever did.
We're going to know every beer they had in high school.
We're going to know every rule they broke.
We're going to know everything about them.
What is that going to mean for politicians who often are guarded, who guard their privacy?
The question you have to ask yourself is, What do those photos and videos really tell us?
The best example is the grab-em-by-the-you-know-what video, the Access Hollywood tape that came out in 2016.
This video, this was going to end Trump's presidential campaign.
People's shock and condemnation everywhere because Trump was caught on a hot mic having this private exchange locker room talk with Billy Bush saying, yeah, these girls, when you're a star, they let you do whatever you want to them.
I just kiss them.
I just grab them by the whatever.
What did that video show us?
What did it actually tell us about Trump?
It told us that Trump is a celebrity.
Yep, true.
It told us that Trump is a womanizer.
He likes women.
I'm not saying he's a woman abuser.
I'm saying he enjoys the company of women and has dated many, many women while he was married, while he wasn't married.
We already knew that.
That was all over the tabloids for 30 years.
It tells us that Trump has a little bit of a naughty mouth while he's talking with the boys, ostensibly in private.
Obviously we knew that.
He's got a dirty mouth in public.
What did it tell us that was new?
Nothing.
But there was this shock of seeing it on video because the visual is so much more compelling than just the argument.
You know, this is why politicians have television ads.
This is why they produce video.
This is why it's all about the style.
It's why they spend so much time manicuring their image.
It's because the images strike us so much more to our core than merely arguments.
This is why Hollywood is so incredibly successful at manipulating our culture.
That's why, not just leftist culture in the United States, but it's actually why the United States has used Hollywood and film as a tool of what is called on the left cultural imperialism.
What we're doing is we're exporting our culture and exerting soft influence around the world.
Now, you can't quite trust the video.
You know, if Trump had run for office in ten years from now, he could say, ah, it's a fake video.
It's fake.
It's a deep fake.
Now, we know it's a real video because it happened 10 or 15 years ago, but he could say that, and I think that's a very good thing.
I'm actually kind of all for it.
I think that we should focus in our politics on what's going on now, on things that actually matter.
Obviously, you want to know the character of the guys that you're electing, but I don't care that he said some naughty word on tape 15 years ago.
It could have an outsized effect on the electorate, and I don't think it should.
I don't care about any of that.
The old photos, the video.
Frankly, I don't even really care about Governor Northam's yearbook photo, which is actually a very bad photo.
It's him either wearing blackface or more likely wearing a KKK hood.
I care what he's doing now.
I care if he's discriminating against people now.
But I don't care about this gotcha thing from 15 years ago.
I mean, I... I do care about the hypocrisy, but I don't care about the thing itself.
I don't care about these gotcha politics.
I mean, this has been what we were talking about yesterday and what we're talking about today.
This could be a way to loosen up that tyranny of the internet, that tyranny of images, that tyranny of big tech.
And we have to break up the power and credibility of big tech.
We have to do it.
We can do it corporate death by a thousand cuts.
That's fine for me.
We can't do it fast enough.
I think we should do it through leaks, inquiries, investigations, prosecutions, lawsuits, anything and everything.
We have to break that up.
You know, big tech makes our life incredibly convenient.
It really does.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, it makes life so convenient.
It makes it so easy to do research, to do business, to connect with friends, to do all of that.
There is a cost to that.
The cost is surrendering your culture and politics to unaccountable, decidedly leftist corporate masters of the universe.
There's a cost to breaking them up, too.
If we broke up those companies, there's a cost.
Maybe a cost of convenience, maybe a monetary cost.
You know, nothing in life is free.
We've convinced ourselves that, oh, yeah, we get to use all these great services online and they're totally free.
They're not free.
There's a cost.
The cost of your data and the cost of your culture and politics.
You know, we've gone on for 20 years now pretending there's no cost.
Kind of a similar issue with China.
We've pretended that there's no cost to just importing all these cheap Chinese goods.
There is a cost.
There's a cost in now they're our biggest creditor.
They own all of our debt.
They have a lot of leverage over us.
There's a cost in that we don't have a ton of manufacturing anymore because we shipped it all overseas because we wanted cheap technological goods from China.
There is a cost that now they can challenge us in the South China Sea or at other points of interest for us around the world.
There is a cost to those things.
Maybe you've got to pay a little bit more for a t-shirt.
Maybe you've got to pay a little bit more to use some gadget or to use some aspect of technology.
But you've got to do it.
The cost is simply too high.
Before we get to the mailbag, I have to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.
This autopsy has now revealed that Epstein had multiple breaks in his neck, specifically in the hyoid bone, which experts told the Washington Post is more common in homicide than suicide.
One medical study of suicidal hangings cited in this report found that the hyoid bone was broken in only 16 out of 264 cases.
And we're talking about hangings, you know, where people usually jump off of a stool and so there's a huge drop and there's a crack.
In this hanging, Epstein didn't have that opportunity.
He would have had to just basically lean forward from a bedpost using a sheet and to try to asphyxiate himself.
So it's even less likely that that bone would have been broken in his case.
The likelihood seems incredibly low.
Now the former bodyguard of his was talking to New York Magazine.
He's contradicting things that he had said years ago in an interview.
He's saying he doesn't remember anything.
He doesn't remember nothing.
There were no underage girls.
He seemed very nervous, according to the interviewer.
Obviously, There's more to this story.
You know, this guy, you have this guy, this former Russian UFC fighter.
He's this really tough guy who years ago in 2015 in a New York Mag interview was saying, yeah, he had these teenage girls around.
Yeah, I was telling him not to do that.
Yeah, I was.
And then now all of a sudden after this suicide, after the death of Epstein, he's nervous, he's sweating.
I have this image off camera of Hillary Clinton there standing with a baseball bat in her hand like, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, you don't know nothing.
You don't know nothing about what happened.
Some people We're still insisting this was a completely accidental suicide.
You've got to ask me to believe a lot of coincidences to believe that, that it's a completely accidental suicide.
The two guards just happened to fall asleep at exactly the same time for hours and hours.
You've got to tell me that...
The suicide watch that he was on, he was taken off of that.
Just coincidentally.
You've got to tell me that he decided to off himself right at the perfect point of the news cycle.
You've got to tell me that all those very, very powerful people all around the world who wanted him dead, who benefited from him dead, just a coincidence.
You've got to tell me that he managed to crack this bone in his neck, which would be more commonly done in strangulation than in hanging.
He just happened to be one of the unlucky ones.
Oh, and by the way, he did it by pulling on a bed sheet on his knees rather than the way it would normally happen by hanging.
That is crazy.
The conspiracy theory now, the craziest conspiracy theory, is that he just accidentally did it.
That he just accidentally was allowed to kill himself.
There's obviously more to this story.
The people telling you otherwise are...
I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell them.
I've got a bridge right across the river from that jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.
Also, important news on 2020.
An Economist YouGov poll has Elizabeth Warren up to 20%.
That's tied with Joe Biden.
Biden's at 21%.
Margin of error is 2.6%.
They're statistically tied.
This is among all likely primary and caucus voters.
We are now getting to the point where this primary is really heating up.
As we predicted, it looks like Joe Biden's best day was his first day.
He just steadily is falling down.
Other candidates are jumping up, including Elizabeth Warren.
These next debates are going to be very interesting because you are going to see that crowd winnow down very, very quickly.
You've got all these guys, Beto, Julian Castro.
They're desperately trying to pull their last minute Hail Mary plays.
Ain't going anywhere, unfortunately, for those guys.
We're about to see the 2020 race actually kick into high gear.
And poor old Sleepy Joe just seems to be sliding and sliding further down.
We've got to get to the mailbag.
But first, you are almost out of time to purchase tickets to our backstage live show next Wednesday, August 21st, at the incredible Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California.
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We'll be right back with The Mailbag.
Here we go.
I'm going to fly through this mailbag from Shannon.
Michael, I was sad to see that the name Fredo is considered an ethnic slur.
That has been my husband Alfredo's nickname ever since we've been married.
It's a name of endearment.
All of his friends call him that as well.
Why do people think it's a slur?
Is it just because of a movie reference?
Thanks, Shannon.
Yes, it's just because of the movie.
Yeah, Alfredo, the nickname for Alfredo is Fredo.
It's the same name as Fred or Frederick and our Alfred.
The name in itself took on this kind of connotation of a weak or stupid guy because of the godfather.
But it's not commonly used.
I mean, I know plenty of people named Fredo.
It's not an uncommon name.
It's kind of the same way.
I mean, they're trying to turn it into an ethnic slur the same way a name like Paco, a Spanish name like Paco, is now used as a kind of slur for Hispanic people.
But the comparison doesn't hold up.
There are a lot of terms for Italians.
I could name a dozen ethnic slurs for Italians right now.
One of them is not Fredo.
That just isn't.
You know, to use one example, there's a phrase dago that you use for Italians.
Or wap.
Wap is even probably the better example.
So wap, there are all these different etymologies for wap.
Does it mean without papers?
Does it mean without passport?
No, it actually comes from the Neapolitan word guapo, which is just like guy, dude, guapo.
Hey, buddy.
Hey, fella.
Guapo.
And so from that, you get the word wop that comes out of it.
Is the word guapo a terrible word in and of itself?
No.
But it's used and become a slur against Italians.
The same has not happened with Fredo.
Fredo is an insult.
For idiots, not for Italians.
And it's a perfectly fine name, so just go on calling your husband Fredo.
No big deal.
From Jonathan, what is your opinion on the separation of church and state?
Thank you, Luke.
I'm very keen on keeping the church protected from my state and keeping the state out of the affairs of my church.
We have, in this country, a First Amendment that does not establish a religion.
So we have a history in the United States of religious pluralism.
The first people who came over here on the Mayflower wanted to practice their own puritanical version of Protestantism.
There were other varieties of that that came over, which established their own colonies.
You had Maryland was a Catholic colony, Maryland.
All these different groups come over, and because of that religious pluralistic history, we have a history of religious toleration and pluralism in the United States.
But the fact that we don't establish a church in the United States does not mean that we're some kind of secular country like the people who insist on the separation of church and state would suggest.
And by the way, there's no such thing as a perfect separation of church and state because the state is a religious institution.
The state has elements of religion to it.
The nation has certain sacred things that it holds together.
I mean, you can just look in our so-called secular culture today.
We have a full-on religion.
We have secular saints like Martin Luther King.
Martin Luther King?
Fine guy.
I'm not knocking Martin Luther King.
But the image of Martin Luther King that has been created in the American civic religion is in many ways a different figure than the actual man himself, Martin Luther King.
When you go to the National Mall, speaking of Dr.
King, we have lots of monuments and memorials to great American figures.
What does the Washington Monument look like?
Is it just a statue of Washington?
No.
It's a giant, bizarre Egyptian obelisk.
That's a religious icon.
What about Lincoln's memorial?
Is it just a statue of Lincoln standing there giving a speech?
No.
It's him sitting like a god in a Greco-Roman temple.
That is a religious idea.
We have to hold certain things sacred.
I mean, we have an American creed here.
We have oaths of allegiance, pledge of allegiance.
We...
common holidays.
We have a secular liturgical calendar.
We have Black History Month to celebrate a particular leftist vision of black history.
It's not actually celebrating black history, but it's celebrating this particular ideology of oppression.
We have Women's History Month.
I Again, same thing.
It's not celebrating women's history.
It's celebrating a particular ideological view of women's history.
Then we have Pride Month.
I mean, we are celebrating pride, which is actually the queen of all sins.
That gets its own month to be consecrated and celebrated on that calendar.
I'm not even knocking it because nature abhors a vacuum and man has religious longings.
And at the bottom of our politics is culture.
And at the bottom of that...
Is religion.
And so we are going to turn our religious longings toward something.
And historically in the United States that's been toward Christianity or a version of Christianity.
And now increasingly it's toward a version of secular liberalism or leftism.
But we're kidding ourselves.
Even I, who I think I look very realistically at what the separation of church and state means and what not establishing a church in the United States means.
But even for people who think we are going to have this firm, hard separation, they just need to understand it's not possible.
And you will worship something.
You will venerate something.
You will consecrate something.
The question in our politics is, what are we going to consecrate?
From Timothy.
Recently on Ben Shapiro's Sunday special, you mentioned that you speak several languages.
What languages do you speak, and how did you come to learn them?
So the only languages that I actually speak, I have a very firm grasp on, are English, depending on the day of the week, and Italian, which is why I'm allowed to say all of those Italian awful ethnic slurs like Fredo, and it's okay because I'm in the in-group.
So I learned Italian actually in school.
I learned it from the age of 11 onward, studied it in college.
I'm a big fan of Dante and Boccaccio and spent a lot of time reading Italian literature.
I didn't really speak it at home growing up.
I'm going to hear words here and there and some dialect, but there are a lot of studies that show that heritage learners just learn the language of their heritage much more quickly than, say, if I wanted to pick up Swahili or something.
And this is specifically true not for the children of immigrants but for the grandchildren of immigrants because they want to not lose a culture that is quickly going away, particularly for immigrants.
So I picked that one up.
My French is bad.
My Latin is worse.
I did study Esperanto when I was in high school.
It's a language that you can learn in ten lessons, though I haven't read it in ten years, so I'm sure I've forgotten all of it.
And one way that I try to make my Latin better is I go to the traditional Latin mass so I can...
I incrementally get a little bit better with my Latin.
But the nice thing about learning a Romance language is once you pick one up fairly well, you can sort of understand a lot of them.
If I go into a Spanish Mass, I can understand almost all of what's going on.
And so I highly recommend it.
People in the U.S. don't learn a ton of languages.
But when you learn language, I think more than really any other educational endeavor, it really expands your mind.
And not just because you can read different literature, but But because you understand symbols and meaning in a different way.
So, highly recommended.
And you should learn more languages better than I do because I was a little bit derelict in it.
From Devin.
Hey, Michael.
The national debt and the spending deficit continue to be a problem for the U.S. Spending seems to have increased under the Trump administration and Republicans don't seem to care about it anymore.
If you were in office and had the means, what would you do to balance the budget and pay off or at least begin to pay the national debt?
What cuts would you make or what departments would you eliminate?
Thanks.
Big fan of the show.
First thing I would do, I get elected.
I would get a nice caterpillar wrecking ball.
I would take that down.
I forget if it's 14th Street or 15th Street.
I would abolish half of the EPA. I wouldn't abolish the whole EPA, but they have a giant, humongous—I wouldn't give them warning either, by the way.
I would just go.
I would knock half the building down and let half the people fall out onto the sidewalk, and then they can go get other jobs.
I would leave, I don't know, half or a tenth of the people in that building.
Then I would take my caterpillar wrecking ball to the IRS, and that whole building is gone.
There's not going to be a bit of dust left.
The people I left at the EPA, I guess they can go do some of the taxes or something at the IRS. Then I would take that caterpillar wrecking ball to the education department.
You know what I would do.
I'll give you one guess.
That's right.
I would take the whole thing down.
I would eliminate quite a lot of these superfluous federal agencies that have been created in the last 40, 50 years.
The reason I would do it is not because I hate the environment.
I love the environment.
Not because I hate education.
I love education.
Not even because I hate taxation.
I do hate taxation, but it is a necessary evil.
What does the education department do?
Tell me what it does.
Can anybody?
I can't seem to get an answer on that.
What does the EPA do?
I understand it's supposed to protect the environment, but practically that's not what it does.
It usually just makes it harder for business to operate.
It does nothing.
It takes away people's property rights, and it doesn't actually protect the environment.
So I would do that, almost more from a matter of personal liberty than saving money, because even if you knock down all of those, it wouldn't save a ton of money.
Though it would help the economy, stimulate the economy by taking away those burdensome regulations.
The only way to actually get the debt issue under control is through entitlement reform.
You have to change the massive entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
They are not sustainable at the moment for people who say, well, I've been paying into it.
Good for you.
You're not going to get anything out of it.
So you do have to reform those.
You have to reform them in keeping with demographic changes, with age changes, and to stabilize programs that were unstable from the very beginning.
That's the only way to do it.
It's a third rail in politics.
There was a moment in 2010 to 2012, 2013, when it seemed like conservatives and Republicans were talking a good game on entitlement reform.
Paul Ryan tried to do it.
Nobody wanted to do it.
And President Trump ran on the platform of, I'm not going to touch entitlement, so I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
I We knew what we were getting.
We knew that when we voted for President Trump, he had his priorities elsewhere.
He's done a very good job on most of those priorities, so I don't even really blame him for it.
He was at least honest about it.
But if you do want to get deficits and debt under control, particularly vis-a-vis China, because China is our biggest creditor, you're going to have to make hard decisions when it comes to those massive entitlement programs.
And the trouble with those programs is, once you set them up, it is so impossible, or nearly impossible, To reform them or to pull them back.
Ronald Reagan said that a federal program is the nearest thing to eternal life on earth.
And he was right.
From Carl.
Hello, Lord of the cesspool of hate, which is what Media Matters called us.
My question to you is how should one respond to militant atheists who say it's impossible for stories in the Bible to have happened, like Noah's Ark and other parts?
Oh, what part?
I mean, what are you talking about?
I guess it's the real question.
That it's impossible for stories to have happened?
What's their story?
What's their evidence?
We know that much of the Bible is historically corroborated.
Many aspects of the Bible are.
So you can point to all those historical moments, not just in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament too.
The life of Christ is well attested to, and in other sources that are non-scriptural.
So you can point to that, but you could also point out to them that the Bible contains genre.
So it's not all a history book.
I don't even know if it's mostly a history book.
The Bible contains poetry.
The Bible contains parable.
Obviously, Christ speaks in parables.
I don't think people think that the book of Job is a history, right, where God and the devil are duking it out over this one poor guy, Job.
That doesn't sound like a history to me.
So I would point that out to him.
And what it seems to me when people come out and say that the Bible is all nonsense, it was written by a bunch of idiot, illiterate farmers or something, is...
I say, well, what's your view of the world?
Because it seems to me that the Bible contains more historical, poetical, philosophical, theological truth, on and on and on, than anything ever written, and it's endlessly nourishing, and there is endless wisdom that comes out of it.
What do you have?
You have some, like, stupid book by Christopher Hitchens?
You have some cheap book made in 2005 that doesn't even do what it says it's going to do, doesn't even answer its own thesis, that God is not great or that religion is terrible or something?
That's crazy.
The line that comes to me always is from Dr.
Johnson, all shallows are clear.
Shallow thinking is clear.
You know, and the people who say the Bible can't be true, I suspect they haven't read the Bible.
And this comes from a school of resentment, which is what the literary critic Harold Bloom calls it.
People now are taught, because of ideology, to approach works of literature or history or texts hating them.
Saying, I'm going to see how this is sexist, or how this is racist, or this is bigoted, or that's all.
And so you go in hating it.
But really, maybe you should approach it from a position of humility and awe, and then say, hmm, what can I take out of this?
I think it was John Stuart Mill who described the difference between the radical and the conservative.
The radical in the form of Jeremy Bentham, the conservative in the form of Thomas Carlyle.
And he said they...
The radical and the conservative approach a received opinion, or a tradition, or a work of text, or art, or whatever.
And they look at it, and the radical says, is it true?
Can I, through my one narrow vision of how this could be true, is it true?
And what the conservative does, he looks at it and says, what does it mean?
What does it mean?
What does the book of Genesis mean?
I assume what your friend is taking issue with is some of the book of Genesis.
I dare your friend to find me A better description of human nature and history and civilization and how we came to be than the book of Genesis.
Ask him if he can find one.
If he can't, I think you're on good footing.
That's our show.
We've got more to get to, but ran out of time.
I will see you on Monday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you then.
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