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Aug. 28, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

45:55

Ep. 406 - The Cult of Self-Love

A pop singer twerks about self-love in front of a giant inflatable butt at the VMAs, Beto gives the slave-owner’s answer on abortion, and a man leaves his wife for Ilhan Omar. Date: 08-28-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	The pop singer Lizzo twerks about self-love in front of a giant inflatable butt at the MTV Video Music Awards.
	We examine how the cult of self-love can actually lead to self-hatred.
	Then Future also ran Beto O'Rourke Gives the slave owner's answer on abortion at a campaign event at the College of Charleston.
	And a man leaves his wife for freshman congressman and socialist squad member Ilhan Omar.
	When pressed for comment, Representative Omar brushed off the allegations stating, Oh please, he's like a brother to me.
	All that and more.
	I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	I can't take credit for that Omar joke much as I would like to.
	That one was going around Twitter yesterday, and I first saw it on the account BoomyLeaks, which has the handle NotWokeyLeaks, so give him a follow.
	It's a pretty good joke.
	There's a lot to get to today, a lot of weird sex going on.
	If we have time, we'll even get to some updates on the Jeffrey Epstein story.
	But I have to begin with the Video Music Awards.
	Did you watch it?
	No, you didn't, because nobody really watched it.
	But there was some seriously culturally relevant stuff going on.
	It wasn't good, it wasn't pretty, it wasn't true, and it wasn't beautiful.
	But it tells you a lot about the culture that you are in.
	A singer who I had never heard of or seen before, but now I'm downloading all of her stuff because she's so fascinating, is Lizzo.
	Lizzo stole the show at the VMAs by twerking in front of a giant inflatable butt.
	The VMAs are very, very stupid, and they pretty much always have been, and they don't matter at all in themselves.
	And especially this one, because it was the lowest rated VMAs ever.
	They got 1.93 million viewers.
	I mean, we have several YouTube videos that have many more views than that, so that's not what we're talking about.
	The reason that it matters, though, there are actually two reasons why this matters, and it tells you something about the state of culture right now.
	The first reason for why this matters is it shows just how far our culture has fallen.
	So, for those of you who aren't watching this, there's this singer, and she's a voluptuous lady, so this is important to the whole story of the song.
	She's a More full-bodied performer, trying to be polite about this.
	And then a bunch of other singers come out, or dancers, and they go and they start dancing around.
	And then behind them is this huge, like, two or three story tall, inflatable butt.
	Our culture, which produced Bach, which produced Chopin, Mozart, which produced Gregorian chant, our culture which built the Sistine Chapel, which sculpted David by Michelangelo,
	which sculpted the Pietà, the Duomo, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, that culture has now decided to reward, as its high point of the year, A giant inflatable butt and a woman rattling off gibberish while other women come on stage and just shake around.
	This is...
	Unfortunate for the culture.
	And because it used to be.
	It's not like we never had low culture before.
	We've had fart jokes and comedies for as long as there have been comedies for thousands of years.
	But there's also been a high culture.
	And the low culture has told us something about the high culture.
	the high culture has built these cathedrals and written these symphonies.
	There is no high culture anymore.
	It doesn't exist.
	It's no, this is the high culture, which is the low culture, which is a giant inflatable butt.
	So then Lizzo gets into the dance.
	She calls these girls on stage.
	And what you can't quite tell when they first come on, but you quickly learn is that the girls in their costumes are wearing assless chaps.
	And then Lizzo continues to speak in this sort of slang.
	And then the girls twerk in the assless chaps for the nation.
	This shows the contradiction of the sexual revolution in a particularly hilarious way.
	Again, I would point you to the giant inflatable butt.
	And the contradiction here is that on the one hand, feminists tell us Feminists tell women in particular that dressing nicely and putting on lipstick and wearing a dress is horribly oppressive and it is degrading because it objectifies women.
	Makes women into sexual objects.
	That's on the one hand.
	On the other hand, we are told that going on national television in assless chaps and twerking in front of a giant inflatable butt is empowering because it gives women sexual agency.
	Some of us knew that feminism was a lie from the very beginning.
	Some people didn't realize that.
	I think now we're finally seeing it.
	I think now we're finally seeing that lie.
	We were told that gender studies, for instance, was an important step in empowering women.
	Now we're seeing that gender studies is erasing the whole category of women altogether through gender ideology.
	The left is very good at destroying things.
	The left is very good at deconstructing.
	The left is very good at breaking things down.
	The left is very good at criticizing.
	They are so good at pointing out all the flaws and weaknesses and bad aspects of culture.
	Everything that was wrong with the way that women behaved and were treated in the 1950s and 60s, the left is really good at pointing that out.
	They're excellent at pointing that out.
	But the left's trick is that we never hold them to account for proposing an alternative.
	They say it's terrible that women are staying at home and raising children.
	It's awful that they cook dinner.
	It's terrible that they wear dresses and wear lipstick and do their hair.
	Degrading.
	Objectifying.
	How terrible.
	They can't do that.
	Here's your assless chaps, man.
	Please put those on.
	That way you can be empowered.
	Does anybody seriously believe that these women dancing on stage are respected more than a 1960s housewife?
	Does anybody really believe that these women, that women generally, are made better off today by casual sex and a culture demands that they get a job and a culture that discourages marriage and a culture that discourages men from taking responsibility for their actions?
	Nobody seriously believes that.
	That is ridiculous.
	But then we get to the second reason that Lizzo's twerky VMA performance really matters for the culture.
	It is a subject that has come to dominate not just leftist culture, but even some people on the right, and it is absolute poison.
	We'll get to what that is in a second, but first, let's get down to business.
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	So on the one hand, you see how the culture has just been totally destroyed and degraded.
	You go from Bach to Lizzo twerking.
	But the more urgent reason, I mean, look, we could complain about the culture decaying all day.
	The more urgent reason why this VMA performance matters is because Lizzo is singing about self-love.
	Self-love has totally taken over our culture.
	It is not just in music.
	It's not just in TV. It's the biggest trend in publishing.
	Self-help books are like the dominant category of books, and they have been for decades.
	On the left and on the right and in the center and in people that are not political at all.
	It's all about self-help, self-love, self-self-self.
	It's certainly the biggest trend in social justice circles.
	If you read any left-wing website, you'll see that there are all of these pushes toward self-love.
	It's so hard to love yourself.
	Right before she walks up and gives this speech, she says, I got a bottle of tequila.
	And she drinks, I mean, I assume it's water, but she ostensibly drinks an entire bottle of tequila, which is loving herself.
	And then she gets up and talks about loving yourself.
	And maybe it was accidental, or maybe she's just a good artist and she understands the symmetry there.
	But that's what self-love is.
	Self-love is like drinking yourself into a stupor.
	Makes you feel good for a little bit, and ultimately it leaves you with a bad hangover.
	It leaves you totally depressed.
	It leaves you totally empty.
	To quote Homer Simpson, alcohol is the source of and the solution to all of life's problems.
	Maybe you've got to reverse that.
	And it's the same thing with self-love.
	You've got to get up.
	You've got to love yourself.
	It's so hard to love yourself.
	She's talking to a room full of celebrities.
	She's talking to a room full of extraordinarily privileged and wealthy people.
	Even the ones who aren't celebrities have just gotten to go there.
	They've flown out to wherever the MTV Video Music Awards are.
	They've bought an expensive ticket.
	And they're dancing around with a ton of celebrities.
	And just all they're doing is indulging their own pleasures and their own desires.
	It shouldn't be hard to feel good in this society.
	What aspect of this society is telling you not to love yourself?
	We have the most indulgent society probably in the history of the world.
	At our most rigorous universities, we've taken away academic rigor.
	We now have safe spaces.
	I mean, no joke, there are kids at elite universities in this country who are given little private rooms with crayons and puppy dogs if their candidate doesn't win an election that they want them to.
	Well, really, if their leftist candidate doesn't win the election.
	I don't think conservatives get the safe spaces.
	This is a totally indulgent culture.
	The whole moral scheme of the culture is if it feels good, do it.
	You do you.
	Love yourself.
	And so this theme is absurd on its face, and I think, I don't know if you've ever heard of Lizzo.
	I had not heard of Lizzo before, and so coming into this without any...
	Frame of reference, I think, gives you a certain clarity because you think, oh my gosh, what has been going on while I've been looking away from the Video Music Awards?
	How did we get to this place?
	And Lizzo makes her point.
	What is the premise of self-love?
	How did we get to this point?
	The premise of self-love is you deserve everything you want.
	She's saying you deserve to feel good as hell.
	You deserve it.
	You deserve to feel good as hell.
	That's a lie.
	You don't.
	Not only do you not deserve to feel good as hell, nobody feels good as hell all the time.
	People feel good as hell like some of the time.
	That's a fantasy.
	That's a delusion.
	The culture of self-love is a lie.
	Who are these people trying to convince?
	You know, if you've got to go out there and say, I'm really beautiful.
	I'm really beautiful.
	I'm the most beautiful thing in the world.
	You probably don't believe it, right?
	I forget who wrote about this.
	I just kind of default to C.S. Lewis.
	But it was one of those types of guys said that, I think it was C.S. Lewis actually, said that the really intelligent guy doesn't have to talk about how intelligent he is to the stupid guy.
	It's always the stupid guy talking about how intelligent he is to the intelligent guy.
	It's never the good-looking person who says, I'm really physically attractive to the ugly person.
	But it is the ugly person who says, I'm really physically attractive to the good-looking person.
	Because they're just trying to convince you.
	You're not confident.
	You have this sort of insecurity.
	This is never more true than with self-love.
	The people I see most on social media or who write in magazines and journals who post the most about self-love are the most miserable people I know to a man or more often to a woman.
	This is always true.
	There is almost no exception to this rule.
	If you are constantly prattling on about self-love, you don't love yourself.
	You're just trying to convince other people that you do, and you're trying to convince them to go down this rabbit hole of madness called the self-love culture.
	And the reason that they don't love themselves is not because they're failing at self-love.
	I think that's the idea.
	If I don't love myself, if I don't feel good as hell all the time, then I'm just not loving myself enough.
	I need to think about myself more.
	I need to think about how I'm entitled to more things, and then I'll be happy.
	No, the opposite is true.
	You won't be.
	The self-love is the problem.
	Usually, almost always, the people who talk about self-love all the time are loving themselves.
	They are behaving in a selfish way.
	They're behaving in a self-centered way.
	They're always talking about themselves.
	They are absorbed in themselves.
	But a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package indeed.
	It's just selfishness.
	It's just self-centeredness that make you miserable.
	That's the problem.
	You think that selfishness and self-centeredness are going to make you really happy and feel good as hell.
	That's what the culture tells you.
	They don't.
	They always make you miserable.
	We used to know this.
	This used to be common sense, but common sense is no longer common in a culture that exalts twerking in front of a giant inflatable butt.
	This common sense has been beaten out of us.
	Now, if you say that you are perfect the way that you are, if you think you deserve all the happiness in the world, the culture tells you that's exactly the right thing.
	Actually, you are giving yourself a recipe for misery.
	Guaranteed.
	The culture of self-love is a culture of delusion and entitlement.
	So what is the actual beginning of real love?
	Not self-love, but actual love.
	First of all, it's not self-centered.
	That love is on someone else.
	You might hear this from a certain Jewish fellow who walked around Israel 2,000 years ago who said, love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.
	Love the Lord your God.
	You're loving your maker.
	You're loving with gratitude.
	You are loving...
	The person who gave you this wonderful life that you have.
	And then, you, who are made in the image of God, love your neighbors as yourselves.
	And you do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
	The actual beginning of real love is this humility and this gratitude.
	It's a love of other.
	First of God, and then, because of that, of your neighbor.
	And, what is your love of God?
	Your love of God expresses a gratitude for the life that God gave you, which you did not create.
	Even if you're an atheist, even if you're an agnostic, even if you have some other religion, we can at least agree you are not responsible for your life.
	You did not create your life.
	You were born into this world, and you were not responsible for that.
	And you're going to live, and you're going to do a lot of things, and then you're going to be taken out of this world.
	Most likely, you're going to have no say in that either.
	Your life at a fundamental level is not your own.
	You can express a gratitude for that.
	And that realization that you're not responsible for coming into this world and you're probably not going to be responsible for coming out of it is cause for a humility.
	St.
	Augustine, I think it was, who said, the four most important virtues are humility, humility, humility, and humility.
	That culture, that actual culture of real love, not self-love, would be Lizzo getting on stage in a sort of nice, elegant dress and then thanking all of her fans for listening to her music.
	She goes to the Video Music Awards and she says, Hey, this is lovely.
	Thank you so much for listening to my music and making me popular and I really like that and I really like all of you.
	It would be Lizzo reminding everyone who's in that room, who's dancing around to the fun tunes, how lucky they are, how unbelievably privileged they are to be able to be in that room listening to fun music that they like and to be in the greatest country in the world that allows them to do that, gives them so much freedom, so much prosperity, such a good protection of their rights, and how lucky they are just to live, just to be alive.
	What a time to be alive.
	That would be a culture of real love.
	By the way, that's what award shows used to be until like five minutes ago.
	Award shows used to, well, not five minutes ago.
	It really started going downhill in the 70s.
	But before that, the award shows were, you would get up there and you'd say, thank you so much.
	Thank you.
	Thank you to my country.
	I'm so glad to live in the greatest country on earth.
	And thank you to God for blessing me with all these wonderful blessings.
	Good night.
	That exhibited something called class.
	That exhibited something called grace.
	That was rooted in a fundamental humility.
	Then award shows became about entitlement.
	You saw this a little bit when Brando went up at the Oscars.
	He didn't go to the Oscars.
	He sent a Native American Indian to complain.
	And that was when things started to turn a little bit for the worse.
	Then you saw Michael Moore.
	He goes up at the Oscars and he complains.
	And now people just go complain.
	They get up there and they say, ah, everything's terrible.
	Trump's awful.
	And all the people who voted for him were terrible.
	And everyone, it's all BS. It's all BS. I'm tired of the BS. I need to love myself more.
	People need to love me more.
	Feel good.
	Let's all feel good.
	That's not nice.
	People don't like that.
	You don't have to take my word for it.
	Back in the olden times, you know, like 20 years ago, people were happier.
	And 40 years ago, people were happier.
	And 50 years ago, people were even happier still.
	This is according to every survey that has attempted to measure happiness and satisfaction.
	Now, it's difficult to measure those things because in many ways they're unquantifiable.
	But in so much as they are quantifiable, people used to be a lot happier.
	And by the way, the objects of this sexual revolution and the particular objects of this culture of self-love and the participants largely in this culture of self-love are women, and they have become the most unhappy.
	Their happiness has dropped off most precipitously, both in absolute terms and in relative terms to men.
	This culture is poison.
	Now, what do we have?
	We have rising epidemics of misery, loneliness, drug addiction, and suicide.
	Not even just among older people, but among teenagers as well.
	Surging rates of teenage suicide, up 70% in recent years.
	Obviously something isn't working.
	Obviously the culture of self-love, so-called, is not working.
	You know, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results.
	So maybe, we've tried this self-love, entitlement, I get mine, self-love culture for a long time.
	Maybe let's try something else.
	Maybe let's try humility or even modesty.
	And modesty and humility are related, but they're not the same thing.
	Modesty would imply, for instance, some gratitude and fewer inflatable buts.
	Inflatable butts are not modest.
	Assless chaps are not modest, and I don't think they make anybody happy.
	Speaking of this culture of shallow selfishness, though, we've got to get to someone who is a far greater embarrassment to our country than Lizzo and Lizzo's fans.
	I speak, of course, of Beto O'Rourke.
	Beto O'Rourke taking the culture of selfishness and shallowness to the campaign trail.
	He was at a campaign stop at the College of Charleston because he still thinks he's running for president, even though he's polling at negative 7% or something like that.
	He still thinks he's running.
	He's still out there.
	He was asked a question about abortion.
	It was an amazing question.
	The guy said, I was born, I don't know, I think it was September 8th.
	Was, you know, whatever year he was born.
	On September 7th, was I not a human being entitled to live?
	Should it be okay to murder me on September 7th, a day before I'm born?
	And Beto O'Rourke gives a gruesome answer, a grotesque answer, a cruel and enormous answer, but he gives the honest answer.
	I was born September 8th, 1989, and I want to know if you think on September 7th, 1989, my life had no value.
	Of course I don't think that.
	And of course I'm glad that you're here.
	But you...
	Stop it right there.
	You heard that but.
	That's the but that's going to negate everything he said.
	No, of course I don't think you should have been killed the day before you're born.
	And of course I'm happy you're here.
	But...
	And he's going to go on to negate everything that he just said.
	Because I say this as an honest answer that he's about to give.
	Because the logic of abortion is if it's okay to kill a person...
	If it's okay to kill a baby at, I don't know, two weeks old, then it's okay to kill a baby at four weeks old, then it's okay to kill a baby at 40 weeks old.
	The logic of abortion is either you can't kill innocent humans ever, or you can kill them at some arbitrary line, and if the line is being drawn at birth, if it's all about pre-birth and post-birth, then of course you can kill the baby.
	A day before he's born.
	And really, if you're following that to its logical conclusion, you can kill the baby after it's been born, as the Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, talked about.
	He said, yeah, if the baby's born, but the mother wanted to kill it, then we'll put it on the table, we'll make it comfortable, and then I'll ask the mother if the mother still wants to kill it.
	And if she does, then we'll kill it.
	I mean, that was the implication of what he was saying.
	So Beto O'Rourke says, no, no, of course, you were a dignified human being the day before you were born.
	But...
	Reference my answer in Ohio and it remains the same.
	This is a decision that neither you nor I nor the United States government should be making.
	That's a decision for the woman to make.
	We want her to have...
	What does that even mean?
	So I oppose murder.
	I think murder is wrong and we shouldn't murder people.
	Beto O'Rourke says, I agree.
	Yeah, no, yeah, sure, I get it.
	You don't want to be murdered.
	It would be bad for you to be murdered, but that's a decision for the murderer to make, not for you to make.
	You know, actually, even, let's take this argument further.
	The answer that he is giving is the slave owner's answer.
	Because if you try to talk about it as just a matter of law and laws about murder, it doesn't make any sense.
	Of course we have laws against murder.
	We have laws against littering.
	We have laws against killing the spotted eagle.
	Of course it's a matter for the government.
	That's what democratic politics is.
	That's what republican politics is, is us deciding as a people what laws we want to make, what kind of country we want to live in, then we elect people to pass those laws, and then we live under those laws.
	So of course that's a matter for the government.
	If the question of life and death is not a matter for the government, then what is?
	Littering?
	Okay, the government can handle littering, but on questions of actually protecting your life, the government has to stay out, unless it's the life of the spotted eagle, or the delta smelt, or the Or any other person except for the babies when it's convenient for us to say that we should kill them.
	That doesn't make any sense.
	The more coherent argument that he's talking about, and it's coincidental that he's giving this at the College of Charleston, is really about slavery.
	That's the argument.
	The argument he's making is, look, regardless of what you think about slavery, that's not a decision that the government can make.
	That's a decision for the slaveholders.
	Look, you might not support slavery, so you don't have to have any slaves.
	But the slave owner's got slaves.
	You're going to tell him that he can just release his slaves?
	How dare you?
	How could you come and tell him to do that?
	The slave owner has his slaves.
	You don't have your slaves.
	That's fine.
	Agree to disagree.
	It's choice.
	He chooses to have slaves.
	You choose not to have slaves.
	And the obvious answer to that is, What about the slave's choice?
	Isn't the slave a person?
	What about the baby's choice?
	Isn't the baby a person?
	It's not a matter just for the mother to decide.
	The baby's a baby.
	It's unbelievable.
	He's not quite making an argument for states' rights.
	He's even going more radical than that.
	He's making an argument for slaveholder rights.
	He's making an argument for murderer rights.
	Doesn't make any sense.
	It's so utterly cowardly.
	It is so profoundly immoral.
	And, I mean, Beto O'Rourke is not going to be remembered in history, but for the significant people who are making this argument, they are going to look so, so bad.
	In future eras, if there is a future era of moral clarity, they're going to look just absolutely awful.
	They are defending pretty much the worst thing you can imagine.
	Just killing innocent little babies.
	We'll get to where Beto even draws out further the slavery analogy.
	And then we will get to Ilhan Omar's sex scandal.
	I can't believe I'm saying that, but, you know, hey, we're in silly season, aren't we?
	We'll get to all of that and maybe some updates on Jeffrey Epstein if we have the time.
	But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
	You know, Daily Wire is turning four years old.
	Still old enough to abort, I think, in Virginia and in the state of New York, but getting around that age now where it's really pretty a significant thing.
	Four years!
	Thank you to all of our fans.
	As a thank you, we are giving away one month of our premium monthly subscription to anyone who uses the code BIRTHDAY. So easy.
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	Come on and join the fun.
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	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	Okay, so the government has no say in whether or not we kill babies, but Beto goes on with his argument.
	We want her to have...
	The best possible access to care and to a medical provider.
	And I'll tell you the consequence of this attack on women's right to choose.
	And I listened to you and I heard your question, I'm answering it.
	And the attack on Roe versus Wade, which we thought was the settled law of the land.
	And lest we had any illusion That the achievements that we've made are protected forever or that progress is inevitable.
	That has been shattered right now.
	And I want to tell you some of the consequences of this.
	Okay, we thought that Dred Scott was the settled law of the land, okay?
	We thought that the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott that blacks can never be citizens.
	We thought that was the settled law of the land.
	That's a Supreme Court decision, okay?
	And now, now we're being told it's not.
	Slave owners' rights to choose are being challenged.
	And then you see the guy there, the guy who asked the question.
	He's like, right, but what about my right to live?
	What about, guy, you're telling me you could kill me a day before I was born?
	Hey, hey, I listened to your argument, okay?
	Now listen to my argument, okay?
	Dred Scott is the settled law of the land, okay?
	And slave owners have a right to choose.
	Now check out this sick move on my skateboard.
	Check this out.
	I can do it while I eat a french fry.
	So, you see, he starts the argument talking about women's health care.
	Now, he'll get back to that.
	This is another minefield for him.
	But the argument, this is the settled law.
	We've had a lot of bad settled laws in this country.
	And we overturn them because they're horrific.
	They're enormous.
	They're not tolerable.
	He won't acknowledge that.
	Then he gets into an even worse decision for him right now, an even worse area of the argument, which is women's health care.
	In my home state of Texas, thanks to these trap laws that make it harder for providers to offer the full spectrum of reproductive care, more than a quarter of our family planning clinics have closed.
	And it has made us one of the epicenters of this maternal mortality crisis because not only can you not get safe legal access to an abortion, You cannot get access to a cervical cancer screening or a family planning provider or in a state that refused to expand Medicaid, any provider at all, and we are losing the lives of women in our state as a result.
	Okay, now he's just sort of rambling because he knows he can't answer this question because his answer is so morally repugnant.
	But what he's starting to get at is the shrinking of so-called family planning services because of different rules and regulations.
	One rule, for instance, just came out this past week out of Title 10, which was the federal government.
	Trump administration came in and said, okay, we're going to continue to give out the quarter billion dollars a year of Title 10 funding.
	Title 10 funding is for family planning services, but we're not going to give that money out to abortionists.
	So you can either have your Title 10 funding, your family planning funding, if you actually want to be a family planning provider and not a family killing provider, right?
	You're actually planning growing families.
	They call it reproductive health.
	It's the exact opposite of reproductive health.
	It's against reproduction and it kills you.
	So it's obviously not health.
	They say, okay, we'll give you the reproductive health.
	We'll give you the family planning, but you can't provide abortions.
	So you can either have your family planning or you can have abortions, but you can't have both.
	And All of these leftist organizations that pretend to focus on family planning turned away the money.
	Why?
	Because they have nothing to do with family planning, and all they want to do is kill babies.
	Planned Parenthood gets $60 million a year through Title X funding, and they turned it down.
	Now, they get a lot of other.
	They probably get another, what, $440 million of taxpayer funding at least every year through other programs.
	But they still took well over a 10% hit because they don't actually do family planning.
	They just kill babies.
	That's what Beto is talking about here.
	And what the Republican response to that should be is, well, we want to help women.
	We want to help families.
	We want to help mothers.
	Here's all the money.
	We're not going to cut one penny from any of that funding.
	You have to choose abortion or women's health, because what the left has done is conflate abortion with women's health, but they're not the same.
	So what the right can do is make the left choose.
	We should do it with a more serious candidate than Beto O'Rourke, because Beto ain't going nowhere.
	And then he finishes up his pseudo-argument.
	I don't question the decisions that a woman makes.
	I mean, only she knows what she knows, and I want to trust her with that.
	So I appreciate the question.
	I don't question a decision a woman makes.
	What kind of patronizing idiocy is that?
	Because women can't make mistakes.
	Just like women can't lie.
	You have to believe all women because women can't lie.
	They don't make mistakes.
	They don't lie.
	This is, I mean, not at the height of the Victorian era did people treat women with such ridiculous unreality, put them on such a pedestal.
	Wow, they can't lie.
	Goodness, they can't make any mistakes.
	Why would you trust women more than you would trust men, more than you would trust anybody?
	If a woman wants to kill somebody, It's just as wrong as if a man wants to kill somebody.
	If a mother wants to kill her child, it's just as wrong as if a father wants to kill his child.
	Doesn't make any sense.
	Speaking of other very bad Democrats, though, I want to move on to one who's more relevant than poor Mr.
	Beto, and that, of course, is Ilhan Omar.
	Is now caught in a sex scandal.
	Ilhan Omar, if you thought she couldn't get bad enough, she stole another woman's husband.
	This just came out out of divorce proceedings that are going on in court.
	There's a woman, a physician, who's 55 years old.
	She's married to a 38-year-old man who is a political consultant and a Democrat.
	That consultant has worked for left-wing Democrats in his career, including Ilhan Omar.
	He also worked for Keith Ellison, so he works for all these radicals.
	The 38-year-old man, Democrat operative, and the 55-year-old physician have a 13-year-old son together.
	Now he is going to leave her and break up the marriage because he's fallen in love with Ilhan Omar.
	This from the court papers.
	The parties physically separated on or about April 7, 2019, when defendant told plaintiff that he was romantically involved with and in love with another woman, Ilhan Omar.
	It gets even more sorted because not only did the congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, steal the woman's husband, she also paid this guy, his name is Tim Minette, and his consulting firm, $230,000 through her campaign since 2018.
	So it's something like one out of every three dollars she's spent, or something like that, has gone to this guy's campaign, or this guy's firm.
	The reason I bring this up, it's awful when a spouse leaves and a marriage breaks up.
	It's just awful.
	I know many people who have found themselves in that position.
	If I can offer any consolation, consider this.
	At least your spouse didn't leave you for Ilhan Omar.
	You know, every storm cloud has a silver lining.
	It's bad enough to say, honey, I am breaking up our marriage and I'm leaving you for someone else.
	But imagine if you heard, honey, I'm breaking up our marriage and I'm leaving you for the devil.
	Yes, yes, the actual devil.
	I love the devil.
	I'm leaving you for someone who giggles when she says Al-Qaeda, someone who compares the United States military to terrorists.
	I am leaving you, honey.
	I'm leaving you for the devil.
	There's a little silver lining there.
	I'm actually not even mentioning this to pick on Ilhan Omar.
	I'm not surprised by this.
	Politicians are not exactly known for their marital fidelity.
	In part, this is a temptation of the office because you're getting adulation all the time and you've got long hours on the road and long hours away from your family.
	So there's a kind of natural temptation there.
	There's also the personal temptation of the kinds of people who run for elected office.
	The kinds of people who run for...
	Office in Washington.
	You know, some of those people are really good, honorable men like George Washington.
	Most often, they're just vacuous egotists who have a huge ego and do whatever they want, and a lot of them are sociopaths anyway.
	So, I'm not even, look, is she a sociopath?
	I don't know, probably.
	She giggles about Al-Qaeda, and she breaks up some poor woman's marriage.
	So, yeah, it seems like in the sociopath corner, there's a lot of evidence, and in the not sociopath corner, there isn't.
	But I mention this in particular because Ilhan Omar is the left's vision of purity.
	She wears all white.
	I mean, she even wears all white, right?
	I am the pure.
	I'm ideologically pure.
	I'm religiously pure because the left hates Christianity and they love all other religions that aren't Christianity and Ilhan Omar is a Muslim.
	They love that.
	They like that she hates America.
	She's just so, she's so virtuous compared to Trump.
	How awful!
	Trump said that she should go back where she came from.
	She's wonderful.
	She's more American than Trump.
	She's so wonderful.
	She's perfect.
	Trump should go back where he came from.
	That's what they say.
	She's sort of the anti-Trump.
	And now we find out...
	Forget even ideologically, because the right doesn't like what Ilhan Omar thinks, reasonable people don't like what Ilhan Omar thinks, and the left doesn't like what Donald Trump thinks.
	So just forget ideologically for a second.
	From a personal level, Ilhan Omar is just as debauched as Donald Trump.
	We've heard for years Trump is so terribly debauched on a personal level.
	He's been married three times.
	He's slept with his friends' wives.
	He's cheated on whatever.
	Ilhan Omar is at least as personally debauched as Donald Trump.
	And guess what?
	I suspect most of the people in Washington are pretty personally debauched.
	Because they're people, and it's a corrupt place, and they're often vacuous egotists, and they're getting a lot of adulation, they're away from their families, just pointing it out for the left.
	Next time you throw stones, speaking of adultery, next time you throw stones, Consider what you are doing.
	Consider what your side looks like.
	Before you pull the speck of dirt out of your neighbor's eye, your opponent's eye, maybe pull the plank out of your own.
	Got to get to a little bit of Epstein because there's some serious Epstein stuff going on over here.
	Jeffrey Epstein is somehow still in the news.
	Washington Post is reporting that footage from the camera stationed outside of Epstein's cell during the time that he allegedly committed suicide is apparently unusable.
	Are you kidding me?
	To recap, this is what the people want us to believe.
	This is what the people investigating this whole situation want us to believe.
	The guy with the worst dirt on the most powerful people in the world just committed suicide.
	Well, maybe he did.
	He was under a lot of pressure and he was going to jail for a bad crime.
	Okay.
	Except he was taken off of suicide watch just six days after he allegedly committed, tried to commit suicide.
	In the first place, taken off of suicide watch, whoops, what a mistake.
	Then his cellmate was transferred out who could have stopped it or even witnessed it.
	Then both of the guards who were supposed to be watching him on the night he committed suicide both just happened to fall asleep at exactly the same time and they left him alone for hours and hours.
	Then an autopsy showed that he had a bone broken in his neck that is very rarely broken in hanging, even if you're hanging, dropping off a stool and actually cracking your neck, much less leaning forward on a bunk bed.
	It's much more common in strangulation, but okay, let's just still call it Let's still call it suicide.
	Then there were no cameras pointed inside his cell, and now the camera pointed to the outside of his cell wasn't working.
	What does that even mean?
	What does it mean the footage was unusable?
	Does it mean that there was a tech glitch?
	Does it mean someone switched it off?
	Or does it mean someone put a sheet over it?
	I don't know.
	All of this as more evidence emerges from a 2005 raid on Epstein's compound, which found naked underage girls, photos of naked underage girls, and phone messages from very powerful people.
	A couple phone calls from Trump.
	Now, actually, the Trump ones, at least he has an excuse, which is that at exactly this time, he alleges that he and Epstein had a falling out over a real estate deal.
	Whether or not the phone calls were about the real estate deal, I don't know, but at least he has this one excuse.
	Other guys don't even have one excuse.
	George Mitchell, Democrat senator, phone calls from him, phone calls from Harvey Weinstein, and lots of messages from underage women asking if they could come over and give him massages.
	It would be literally impossible to arrest and question all the powerful guys associated with Epstein.
	You got two presidents, you got a prince, you got senators, you got foreign dignitaries, a lot of powerful people.
	What about Ghislaine Maxwell?
	Why has Ghislaine Maxwell not been arrested, the madam who is procuring girls and allegedly abusing them with Epstein?
	Why is she still walking around free?
	That doesn't make a lot of sense.
	So if the government wants to put conspiracy theories, quote unquote, to rest, that Epstein wasn't just accidentally permitted to kill himself and maybe something else was going on, they at least need to bring in Maxwell.
	If nothing further comes from this case, then the story that he was simply accidentally permitted to commit suicide is just not credible.
	One quick story I got to get to before we go.
	You remember a few months ago, the college board announced an adversity score for test takers.
	So you're going to take the test and then you're going to be scored on your adversity.
	There was outrage because that was ridiculous.
	So yesterday they announced they're dropping the adversity score.
	That's great.
	Conservatives rejoice, except the college board is lying.
	They did scrap the adversity score, but they launched a new version called the Landscape Program, which is the exact same thing as the adversity score.
	The adversity score was one score on a student's suffering.
	The Landscape Program gives you six scores about the neighborhood you grew up in and the high school you went to, median family income in that neighborhood, all that sort of stuff.
	This is a terrible idea, and it's very dishonest.
	They're saying they got rid of it, and they didn't.
	Now, instead of one adversity score, you get six.
	The problem isn't the number of adversity scores.
	The problem is the concept of adversity scores in the first place.
	There is no such thing.
	You cannot quantify suffering.
	You can't do it.
	I know poor kids who grew up in bad neighborhoods, and they had a much better upbringing than rich kids who grew up in rich neighborhoods.
	I know kids who grew up in great loving homes in poor neighborhoods.
	And I know kids who grew up in really, really rich homes where the father beat the mother regularly in good neighborhoods.
	You can't quantify suffering.
	Everybody suffers.
	That is a fact of life.
	And it is Marxist claptrap to pretend that suffering can be boiled down to economic conditions.
	That just is not the case.
	Suffering is not primarily a factor of your economic circumstances or your financial circumstances.
	Actually, usually suffering is a factor of spiritual circumstances and chance.
	The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.
	And by turning a disadvantage into an advantage, you are perverting a culture that should center around humility and gratitude, and you're turning it into one that incentivizes self-pity and entitlement.
	That is a very bad thing.
	It's a very bad lesson to teach kids.
	Also, the entire purpose of the SAT is to standardize a test.
	The minute you bring in these completely malleable subjective adversity scores, you completely undermine the entire purpose of the SAT. There is nothing compassionate about that.
	There is nothing right-headed about that.
	It's the worst lesson to teach kids as they go into college, which don't forget campuses are the future.
	Look at a college campus.
	That's the country you're going to get in 20 years.
	And if we have an epidemic of self-pity and so-called self-love now, which really leads to self-hatred, just imagine how bad it is going to get when we try to measure suffering itself.
	We so incentivize that even before the kids make it to college.
	Not a good look for the future of the country.
	Hopefully they change it.
	That's our show.
	Come back tomorrow.
	Get your mailbag questions in.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	See you then.
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	The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz, director Mike Joyner, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our senior producer is Jonathan Hay, supervising producer Mathis Glover, technical producer Austin Stevens, editor Danny D'Amico, our audio mixer is Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Jesua Olvera, production assistant Nick Sheehan.
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