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Aug. 28, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
01:00:55
The Conversation Ep. 23 Michael Knowles
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And we're going to do it live.
Hey everyone, I'm Elisha Krause, host of this episode of The Conversation.
With me is Michael Knowles, who will be taking your questions live for an entire hour here on The Conversation.
Alright, it's good to be back, but I need to remind everybody because I've been out for a few weeks.
It's been a little while.
They should know that only subscribers get to ask the questions.
I'm not pregnant anymore, so I'm going to have some of this now.
Hang on.
As good as you remember it?
As good as I remember it.
By the way, hopefully that will make Michael more interesting in his answers.
Yeah, well, it's going to get more and more interesting as the show goes on.
Is it two fingers?
Is that what that's called?
Yeah, something like that.
Alrighty.
So, when Michael answers your questions, he's only going to be taking them from subscribers who get to ask those questions.
You're not a subscriber?
Don't worry.
It's never too late.
Head on over to dailywire.com right now.
Click on the link in the video description, and if you want to ask a question or become a Daily Wire subscriber, you can do so right there.
And be sure to tune in for next month's episode.
We don't have a date on that yet, but it's going to be with our editor-in-chief, New York Times bestselling author, my brother from another mother, you know, racist, bigoted, homophobe Ben Shapiro.
That Nazi.
Yeah, right.
The old right Nazi Ben Shapiro.
What have you been dubbed?
Well, I'm very pleased because Southern Poverty Law Center said that of all the Prager videos, mine was the most egregious.
So I got most egregious and also that I'm a bigoted cesspool of hate.
So that's not bad.
It's not quite Nazi, but it's not bad.
If they only knew that the Daily Wire office is really a cesspool of hate towards you.
That's right.
I am the recipient of the cesspool of hate.
You're like, I'm the victim here.
That's right.
I'm the victim here.
You are the minority.
They never give me any of my grievance.
That's too bad.
It's good to be back.
We got some great questions.
It was really fun to see everybody at Backstage Live.
How fun was that?
I've been getting tons of messages from people.
There are people that flew in from Puerto Rico.
Canada?
Yep.
Like, Central America?
South Africa.
Someone flew in from South Africa to California for the backstage live.
To see you?
To see, let alone, it was, I don't know, it was probably like Drew or somebody, right?
But still, I was there also.
It was tons of fun.
It was a great crowd.
We got to do more live things like that because the audience is so much fun to be around.
It was terrific.
But we also love doing these for you guys and talking to our streaming audience who are equally as awesome.
Let's get to this question from Danny, a terrific Daily Wire subscriber.
His question is, in the 2024 election, assuming that Ben doesn't run, TBD, who do you think has a better chance of getting the Republican nomination?
Oh, one can hope.
Dan Crenshaw?
Or Ted Cruz?
Or someone else?
And why?
I'm going to be very careful in my answer because I know and like both of those guys very much.
They would both be terrific candidates.
I did a commercial.
I did two commercials actually for Ted Cruz.
I supported him in the 2016 primaries.
I really like Dan Crenshaw.
I think he's a terrific guy too.
I suspect...
We just don't know yet.
I'm not saying it won't be one of those two guys.
I'm not saying either of those guys are going to run.
It's just, if you had asked years and years out, five years out, so in 2011, would you have said, Donald Trump is going to be the nominee in 2016?
I don't think so.
I don't think you would have been able to do that.
Could you even have said that about Mitt Romney in 2012?
Could you have said that about John McCain in 2008?
I just don't think so.
We are way too far out.
Politics does not stay eternal in the abstract forever.
Circumstances change.
Look, depending on how the economy does, we could have a very different situation in 2021 than we were looking at right now.
So there's just no way to tell.
But I love Cruz and I love Crenshaw, so I think those guys should both take it seriously.
Danny, I can't believe you forgot my girl and Ben's spirit animal, Nikki Haley.
Nikki Haley is obviously a real contender, too.
She'd be incredible to be in that mix.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that really, we can always tout that the Republicans are going to have a better lineup than the zoo of people on the left right now.
True, other than Eric Swalwell, because he's all of us.
He's every single one of us.
He's you and me.
So actually, the one who's going to win the 2024 nomination for the GOP, guaranteed to be Eric Swalwell.
Okay.
Margo says, Michael, are you writing a real book with words in it?
I have to tell you something.
I am.
I haven't talked too much about it yet, and once there's...
Once we've got something together, we'll release it.
Writing a book with words is much, much harder than writing a book without words.
Though I put much more research into my book without words than I put into my book with words.
It's actually a lot of fun though.
I really do enjoy writing even when I have to use words.
It helps you focus your thoughts.
And so I've had a good time writing it.
Hopefully I'll be able to crank this book out, you know, before I'm 85.
You know that the Charlie Brown teacher noise is not, it doesn't equal real words.
That's not a word?
That wah-wah, wah-wah-wah.
You can't have a whole book of that.
Yeah, what is that?
No, I'm writing like a Dadaist manifesto.
So it'll really, I've gone from no words to just kind of nonsense words.
Okay.
Yeah, so look out for that.
Like toddler speak.
It will be really big with my two-year-old then.
Ethan wants to know, often conservatism is defined by the beliefs of Judeo-Christian values.
Ben's book, of course, Right Side of History, talks about that a lot.
However, there are many places where the two don't agree.
What's, in your opinion, the balance of Jewish values to Christian values?
Oh, you mean that there's a difference between Judaism and Christianity rather than between Judeo-Christian values and conservatism?
Yes, of course.
There's a big difference between Judaism and Christianity.
Namely, an old Jewish fellow by the name of Jesus said, So that would be one difference.
As that pertains to politics, you'd have to give me a more specific example.
I guess the big theological difference would be that of grace, that of unmerited grace, your savior coming down because you cannot redeem yourself, you cannot atone for your own sins.
The world is hopelessly broken unless you have hope in a true savior named Christ who comes down, conquers death on the cross, rises again on the third day, and redeems mankind.
Obviously, Judaism doesn't have Jesus, and so you see other political values that come out of that.
Different focuses on mercy rather than on justice, or different visions of justice.
Those would be significant differences in those two things.
I don't even really use the phrase Judeo-Christian so much, because we're talking about two different religions.
Christians view Christianity as the fulfillment of Judaism, so I think it's important to also mention those shared values, and when it comes to politics, those are the values that undergird our country.
You know, we're not a Buddhist country, we're not a Hindu country, we're a country that was founded on Christianity, and Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism, so the phrase Judeo-Christian really talks about something real.
Without that, of course, there is no West, there is no America, there are no American values.
So I think politically the reason people don't talk about the differences very much is it just doesn't have very much bearing on the country.
Or the major, other than the Messiah, who we believe is the Messiah, that there aren't enough glaring differences is what you're saying.
Well, you know, you wouldn't say like the Hindu-Christian values because those are just simply utterly different visions of the world whereas Christianity is Judaism, you know, enfleshed.
Christ comes down as the Jewish Messiah.
So I think those would be the differences, but if you look through all of Western literature, if you want to see those differences be compared in different views of grace and mercy and justice, A huge portion of the conversation that you see happening throughout the Western canon.
Alright, and this is the conversation.
In case you just tuned in, I am Elisha Krause, and this is our guest this month, Michael Knowles.
Next month is Ben Shapiro.
Let's keep rolling through these and give our subscribers their money's worth.
I mean, unless they have the leftist who's Tumblr, and that to me is totally worth it anyway.
But Andrew says, do you have any tips or advice for new college students starting school this month?
I do.
Depending on what you're majoring in, either engage in all of these political ideas and be out there and do exactly what I did and really refine your political views in public, in conversation, or if you want to get a job, keep your head down.
Because there's a vindictive climate right now, both at the academy and in corporate America.
And what you say and what you do will have consequences.
I don't think I got knocked on too many grades because I was out about my political views, but it does happen, and it happened to me very little bit on occasion.
And if you want to apply for certain jobs, if you want to go into certain fields, you might have to be a little quieter about it.
What I would focus on is studying the real things.
Don't study ethnicity studies.
Don't study feminist studies.
Don't study studies studies and all the different studies.
I would study history, English, math, foreign languages, classics, philosophy.
Study the real subjects, the real sturdy subjects.
Get a liberal education if you're at a liberal arts school.
If you're going into a more professional school studying business.
Fine, go and do that.
But I would study those real things.
The more faddish ideological disciplines that are coming up are really useless.
And statistically, you're probably likely to be going into debt if you're going to college right now.
So make sure you get an education that's worth something.
Doesn't mean it has to train you for a job.
Liberal education is not supposed to train you for a job.
But you should be getting something for those years of your life and for all that money that you're going to be putting into it.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I mean, even community colleges are insanely expensive now.
Yeah, it can be.
This is a very important question.
Samantha's curious to know, how's your fish doing?
That's an excellent question.
I have this character in the Daily Wire world, which is my tech fish.
Which no one from our office...
It's running, by the way.
Yeah, at first I assumed someone was.
No one's running it.
No one from social media is running that.
It's one of my favorite accounts on Twitter, and so I haven't checked in with my pet fish in a while.
And just as a rule, if you ever catch me speaking to my pet fish, just call in the insane asylum, have them lock me up in a straight jacket, because I've overdosed on covfefe at that point.
It's too much, and you've got to wheel me out of there in a gurney.
I also have Alicia Krauss' cow, like I have a cow.
And so it must be, this is like really deep and behind the scenes.
This has to be somebody, and they're all different people.
I have confirmed that it's not Daily Wire staffers, and they're all different fans from all over the country.
But this fan has to have known, like listened to the morning answer back when Ben and I were on, because I would talk about how we'd name our family cows back in Oklahoma after Jane Austen characters.
Wow, that's a deep cut.
It's real deep cut.
So the Michael Knowles fish, where the heck did it come from?
Was that a deep cut too?
Was that like an early episode of your podcast?
No, I think it's because I've used this flippant line sometimes.
So, you know, when people want to bring up totally irrelevant information, I'll tell them, like for instance, you know, let's say people write to me, they ask for relationship advice.
They'll say, Michael, I'm a young man.
Not the guy to be asking for relationship advice.
They'll say, Michael, I'm single.
I really like this girl.
I asked her out, but she said she has a boyfriend.
So what should I say to her?
I said, well, you should tell her that you have a pet goldfish if we're talking about things that don't matter at all, and then you should go take her out for a drink.
This, I think, is the origin of my pet fish.
Although, you know, one can never be sure of your imaginary pets.
Can my pet fish please tweet, or your pet fish tweet my cow to let us know where this deep cut came from?
And it is a good Twitter follow.
That's true.
For sure.
Much better than Michael.
All right.
Ezra says, Michael, who do you think will be the Democratic candidate?
This is one of the questions I think that we covered it backstage last week.
Well, you know, every day I guess it could change, though it does seem to be going in the direction of Liz Warren.
A lot of us called that Joe Biden was a weak candidate for a few reasons.
One, he doesn't have all of his marbles.
He's losing it.
He's going senile.
I don't even mean that just to throw bombs.
I mean, the guy can't string a sentence together.
He runs out of steam at all of these debates.
Two, he didn't have many marbles to begin with.
He's always been kind of a doofus.
You know, he dropped out in the late 80s because he lied about his law school record.
He plagiarized a speech.
Then in the 2080 ran and no one cared.
And he only became vice president because Obama really, really, really didn't like Hillary Clinton.
He didn't really do anything when he was in the Senate.
He passed one bill, which was pretty good, the crime bill.
Now he has to run away from that.
He's just kind of like...
He's thrown away from a lot of the stuff that he did when he was in the Senate.
Yes, he's kind of like nothing.
And so Kamala Harris has been weak.
I thought she had a really good chance.
She's just not good at retail politics.
She's not likable.
She, too, is running away from her record as a prosecutor.
So if you're going to run away from the only thing you've ever done, why would someone vote for you?
Seems like by default right now, Liz Warren seems to be the one surging.
New Monmouth poll just out today shows Biden's down 13 points according to that poll.
So things are really not looking good for him.
It's hard to see how he turns it around.
Whereas Liz Warren, she's unlikable.
She's got that horrific voice.
She lied about her ethnicity for 30 years.
But she's got a hoo-ha, and they want a woman in the White House.
So if Kamala ain't going to cut it, she's a little more interesting than Kirsten.
Oh, yes.
That's what they do.
It's all identity politics.
True.
And Warren is really smart.
People should not underestimate her intelligence.
Ben has said this because she was a professor when he was at Harvard Law.
That's right.
Your Harvard Law professor.
I mean, she's really sharp.
She's sharp enough to steal all of Bernie's plans for everything.
And she doesn't make as many mistakes as some of the other candidates.
So, you know, if I were a gambling man right now, I think my money would probably be on her.
I have to say about Kamala, too, I think that she does well in the bubble that is California politics, but she doesn't have that appeal outside of our borders.
If she ran on her career as a prosecutor, I think she's also very smart.
I think she's willing to do anything to get ahead.
Let's leave it at that.
And I think she checks all the intersectional boxes.
So I think she could have been a good candidate.
She's just so terrible in person that she's allowed Liz Warren to jump ahead of her.
Boring meets boring, and somehow one came out on top.
That's right.
Alright, we'll have to see what happens.
Etan wants to know, would you consider visiting Israel in the future, possibly as part of a speaking tour?
I would absolutely love to, though I don't want to go with Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar.
I want to avoid that.
Then you wouldn't be able to get in.
Yeah, I don't want to go with Mifta.
I don't want any part of that.
But I would love to go to Israel.
It's a great dream of mine.
Have you never been?
I've never been.
I would love to visit the Holy Land.
And yeah, the first chance that that slave driver Shapiro lets me out of my broom closet, I would really be delighted to make it over there.
It's certainly on my list of, toward the top of my list of places I want to go visit.
Alright, Arun says, Dear Dr.
Kofefe, what Western philosophers do you think should be taught in public school and who should be booted to make room for them?
I don't think any philosophy is taught in public school.
Yeah, I don't know what public school you're going to, but good job.
I had one excellent teacher in high school who taught an elective philosophy course.
Wow.
But that was the exception.
In a public school?
Yeah, public school.
Wow.
But he was the exception, not the rule.
Okay.
If you only had to do one or two, if that was all you could fit in, it certainly would be Aristotle or Plato.
The basics?
Right.
If you could teach Aristotle and Plato, that would so correct some of the...
Many of the academic problems that you see.
There are many other philosophers who should be taught, or theologians as well, or people who kind of blur the line, like St.
Thomas Aquinas.
That would be great to do that.
We tend to have this focus on the Enlightenment philosophers, just in America and in this world, but I think that's kind of a mistake.
There are other great philosophers dating back to antiquity, and we should probably read them.
We should also probably read the ancient historians, like Thucydides.
I think that would correct a lot of educational problems.
And then most importantly, We should read the Bible in school.
This is not my theocratic fascism like some of the leftists want to call it.
You Bible thumper.
I'm not a Bible thumper.
It's not what I'm saying.
I'm just saying it's the most important book that has ever been written and it singularly shaped Western civilization.
And the whole rest of the Western canon that you read after that None of it makes any sense if you are not biblically literate.
So the fact that we don't teach the Bible in school because of some stupid Supreme Court decision 50 years ago to appease some aggrieved atheists is just absurd.
It is not possible to have a serious education if you haven't read the Bible.
Even before the philosophers, I would say we need to get some biblical literacy back in schools as well.
So here's a follow-up question to that.
Would you say that the average American that, you know, might be middle class and just work a nine-to-five job every day should read all the things that you said?
Or do you think, because you and Andrew Klavan have defended, you know, when Jeremy and I are kind of like anti-college.
Yeah, well, I'm pro-liberal education.
A lot of colleges screw that up.
And you're very pro-liberal education.
Drew talks about this a lot.
Of course, he spent a lot of time, you know, at Oxford and in England and has a love for old history and all that stuff.
Do you think that that's something that is only for the, I guess, the elite educated people?
Or do you think that is the philosophy for everyone?
Well, college is not for everyone.
And these days, it's probably for no one.
But, you know, in 1940, 1945, I think we had about 5% of Americans graduated from a four-year college.
Now, 60% of high school seniors are going to go on to a college.
Many of them won't graduate.
They'll go into debt and not graduate.
But I don't think that liberal education is necessary or a four-year liberal arts college is necessary for everyone.
I suspect there were a whole lot of farmers in the 19th century who knew a whole lot more about our Western tradition than graduates of Yale, Harvard, Stanford today.
And The reason for that, there was a study from ISI, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007, so it's almost certainly gotten worse, and it showed that seniors graduating from the best colleges in the country, or at least the elite colleges, knew less about their history and their civics and their government than the freshmen who were coming in.
They somehow became more ignorant during their time in college.
So I don't think that everyone should go to college.
I think many fewer people should go to four-year liberal arts colleges.
However, many more people should have a liberal education.
That begins not only when you're five years old in kindergarten through high school.
That should begin in the nursery.
That should begin with your parents reading you the Bible, reading you great poems, or reading you even mediocre poems.
But educating you, playing you music, opening you up to culture.
I was in a room with my priest in New York on his birthday party.
And at the end of the night, we were playing a Chopin Nocturne.
There were five or six of us there.
It was so beautiful.
And somebody in the room mentioned, said, there are many people on the street who don't even know that this exists.
That's not snobbery to say that.
It's to say, what a beautiful thing that we're experiencing.
And this has been denied.
Many people in the country.
Everyone should be exposed to that kind of culture.
Everyone should be exposed to that kind of education in the true sense of the word.
And ironically, these days, the formal process of the four-year colleges with the brand name, in many cases, are actually undercutting that educational mission.
All right.
Laurel, one of our favorite subscribers, good to see you last week.
Laurel says, hey, Michael, if I were to sew you a bow tie, what are some ideas of the colors and designs that you would like?
Oh, Laurel, I so would appreciate that because I love bow ties.
Tomorrow is actually National Bow Tie Day.
Are you going to rock one on the podcast?
I hope so.
Only if I can decide which one to wear.
I've long loved bow ties.
If it's good enough for Winston Churchill, it's good enough for me.
But I am woefully ignorant when it comes to matters of style.
She should ask Jess.
She should ask Jess.
I actually, especially when it comes to sartorial style, I defer to you, Laurel.
Any bow tie that you make me, I will wear with great pleasure and joy and honor.
I feel like it should be a Leftist Tears one.
You could do that.
There are many.
A Stogie bow tie.
I don't know.
There are many options.
Oh, cigar would be cool.
A little whiskey glasses or something.
There are these people like on Etsy and stuff that make really fantastic prints that people can then use.
Oh, yeah.
They ain't cheap.
I actually would push back against this a little bit though because Today, the reason I don't wear bow ties very much, a lot of people don't, is because they're considered just novelty.
They're considered sort of silly things, so you have kind of novelty designs on it.
But a really crisp bow tie with a little polka dot like Churchill or some nice regimental stripes, that can really look very serious on the right guy.
My husband once wore, we had a black tie event and he had like a velvet suit jacket and a skull and crossbone bow tie.
That's pretty cool.
That's very prep, very traditional.
That's exactly what Winston would have done.
Alright, Dean says, future Saint and Covfefe distributor Knowles, when do you know if your girlfriend is the one that you want to marry?
When you want to marry her.
That's when you know that she's the one you want to marry.
What are you asking me for?
Look, I think people should get married younger.
I wish I got married.
I got married at 28.
I wish I'd done it younger.
Marriage is so great.
I mean, being in L.A., you're from New York.
Oh, I know.
I was like a child, practically, compared to what people get married these days.
And I wish I had done it years earlier.
Marriage is great.
Everything people tell you about how you should wait, and marriage is terrible, and that's all bunk.
It's total BS. When you get married, you are committing to something, to someone...
And to say that you are now ready to be a serious person in society, in civil society.
Very often now, look, I married my high school sweetheart, so that is not going to happen to everybody.
But when I hear people talk about relationships and marriage, they'll say, oh, well, does she check this box?
She checks this and this and this, but she doesn't quite agree with me on this aspect of tax policy.
So she's dead and I got to swipe right and I got to go find someone else.
They show that on Tinder?
Yeah, then I would have signed up.
I knew that.
They're taking the romance out of it.
They're taking the joy out of it.
I mean, dating is fun and marriage is fun too.
There's this idea, especially since the 70s and 80s, that conservatives are the eggheads.
We're the accountants.
We're just tallying up taxes and entitlement programs and all this stuff.
And the leftists, they're the ones pulled by great romance.
The exact opposite is true.
Leftists are the ones tabulating in this utilitarian way the exact price of every aspect of human life.
They're like cynics.
They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Conservatives do have a sense of romance.
I mean, Edmund Burke, the sort of first modern conservative philosopher, was an aesthetic philosopher.
He wrote about beauty.
He was a proto-romantic.
All the romantic poets that came afterward were disciples of Edmund Burke.
And so should we be, conservatives.
So here's how you should know.
Here's how you should know if you should ask a girl out.
Is she cute?
Do you like her?
Does your heart go pitter-patter?
Then go ask her out and go get a drink.
Here's how you know if you should lean in for a kiss.
Do you want to kiss her?
Lean in for a kiss.
See if it happens.
Hopefully she says yes.
Not the hitch rule?
The 90-10?
Yeah, I mean, there are all these different...
Now these days you need a notarized consent form to even shake a girl's hand.
Make sure you have a lawyer present.
Right, make sure you've got a lawyer present.
And then how do you know if you're ready to get married?
I don't know.
Is she a great girl?
Do you want to have a good life?
Do you want to be an adult?
If you like it, then you should put a ring on it.
Yep.
And I think that there's so much too, especially for men, I mean, speaking of Judeo-Christian values, that you change or you should change in your maturity level when you do get married and you have that responsibility.
Even in my household where we're double income, right?
We both work.
There's still a level of things are different for my husband because he is the head of the house.
Yeah.
And, like, there's that responsibility.
And then even more so when you start to procreate and be fruitful and multiply, which is what we're trying to do.
Yeah, right.
Because, you know, I just had a third kid and I'm like, maybe we could go fourth.
You have, like, three kids a year.
I don't know how you do it.
I have to repopulate California with conservatives.
This is true.
You know, one time I was working for Mitch Daniels, the campaign to try to draft him for president, and he came and said, how are we going to save the country?
How are we going to do it?
We've got this crippling debt, education has fallen apart, you know, we've got to fight all these elections.
He said, you can beat the left either, you know, at the ballot box through these really gritty, tough political campaigns, or you can out-reproduce them, and the latter is a lot more fun.
Rick Santorum once told me backstage at CPAC that I appeared to be a good mother so I should have eight more.
And I was like, is that to have conservatives take over?
And he's like, yes, this is my plan.
He's like, what do you think Catholics and Mormons do it for?
That is great.
That's very sex positive.
You know, the left says that we're not sex positive.
Yeah, apparently white men are supposed to not want me to do that.
That's right.
Because they want to shut me down and it's not my body, not my choice.
I don't know.
I'm sure there's some Handmaid's Tale people that will watch and say, well, that's them telling you how to use your body and not giving you the freedom to.
How dare they?
But I also make cute kids.
You make very cute kids.
And you've got to get on that parent wagon.
I know.
I've got to start working on it.
Yeah, and ask the girl out.
Ask the girl out.
Yeah, just man up and do it.
Come on.
Do it.
Come on.
Do it.
Be a man.
It's like that scene when Johnny Fontaine in The Godfather goes up.
I've never seen it, which is why I said Fredo wrong last week.
I know.
Well, I'll give you a glimpse into The Godfather.
I wasn't sure if it was Alfredo, and I didn't want to be racist and say, like, Fredo, like Alfredo.
That's our word.
Because that's what was in my head.
That's our word.
And I said Fredo, and everybody was like, ugh.
So there's a scene in The Godfather.
Johnny Fontaine is the singer.
He goes up to Don Corleone.
He's the main guy, right?
Don Corleone is Marlon Brando.
And Johnny Fontaine says, I gotta get out of my contract, but I don't know how to get out.
And he starts crying.
And Marlon Brando goes up to him.
He said, what can I do?
What can I do?
You can act like a man!
What's the matter with you?
That's what you can do.
Except don't smack her.
Yeah, well, no, I'd be smacking you.
He was theoretically smacking you to make you act like a man.
Media matters.
Michael Knowles advocates smacking women.
Exactly.
Seated next to Blonde Bimbo.
Oh, gosh.
Jessica says, Michael, how do you think C.S. Lewis would be received if he had been alive in 2019 and tried to publish the Chronicles of Narnia now?
What do you think that means for modern Christian writers today?
He would be received like Andrew Klavan.
I don't want to flatter Drew and compare him to C.S. Lewis, but there would be some parallels there.
Drew is a writer of fiction and now non-fiction, and they even share the same version of Christianity.
They're both Anglican.
And Drew has been blackballed from Hollywood.
He's been blackballed from the mainstream of entertainment.
And C.S. Lewis certainly would be, though C.S. Lewis, even in his own time, was an academic.
And even at Oxford, he was sort of discriminated against.
People thought he was a wacko as a Christian writing these children's stories.
They certainly thought Tolkien was a weirdo.
He kind of was a weirdo, creating his own language.
If you're writing about things that are good and true and beautiful, you're probably going to be repulsed by the popular culture.
And that's just the way that it is.
Jesus tells us that that will happen, so it shouldn't come as any surprise, certainly to Christians.
That's the cost.
I mean, that's fine.
Do you want to be accepted by the schlubs of this world, or do you want to do something that is good and true and beautiful and aimed toward your maker and to the higher good?
That's a choice you've got to make, and there are a lot of...
Look, I mean, I... I love my life.
I'm out in terms of my religion and my politics and my sexuality.
No, I'm kidding.
It is kind of funny that we use that phrase, though, especially here in L.A., to refer to our political stance and who knows and who doesn't.
Because in the popular culture of America, it is much, much more dangerous to your career and to your reputation to come out as a conservative or as a Christian than it is to come out as conservative.
Any part of the alphabet soup, LGBTQ or anything else.
I mean, that is celebrated by the culture.
We have a whole month where we celebrate it now called Pride Month, but we don't celebrate the traditional liturgical calendar very much, do we?
So you got to make that choice.
My life is great.
I love it.
I go to sleep with a smile on my face every single night.
Does it cost you some things if you do what you believe and you come out as a Christian or as a conservative?
It will cost you some things.
It's cost Drew millions of dollars.
But I don't think he regrets it.
In so much as I've done any of that, I don't regret it either.
And certainly C.S. Lewis, I don't think, regretted his public life.
Are you a fan of Silicon Valley?
You know, I've never seen it.
Oh, Gosh, it's so good.
Ben and I think it's such a great show.
My husband and I watch it.
And Ben and I always laugh that there's an episode, and I won't give too much away by saying this, but there's a character who is openly gay.
And then one of the main characters outs him as a Christian.
And everybody in the boardroom is pissed off that he's a Christian.
And he's like, how could you tell them?
My career is going to be over.
Don't tell my father.
And it's this arc of an episode where it's so true.
It's like, I think that show's more conservative than people think it is.
I don't even think it's written to be conservative.
It's just nowadays the truth is conservative.
Reality's pretty conservative.
And comedy can be pretty conservative because behind every joke there's a hint of truth.
So watch.
I think you'd like the show.
I gotta check it out.
And that episode, I just hearken back to that, man, when we have conversations like this because it's so true.
Yeah.
All right.
Corey says, Michael, how do we get you, Ben, Andrew, or Matt to come to Denver?
I know it smells like weed here, but there are many conservatives that would love to see more conservative speakers come to Colorado.
I'm only going to go to Denver for the pot.
I mean, that's the big draw.
Okay, I like those things.
Yeah, that's true.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to be stopping in Denver.
I did just learn, though.
We announced my YAF college speaking tour.
I was going to say, you got some fancy school So I'm going back to my old stomping grounds at Yale.
They're probably going to tar and feather me, send me back on the metro north to the city.
And ask for your diploma back.
They're going to take my diploma back.
That's guaranteed.
I'm going to hide that before I go.
I'm going to GW in Washington.
They're trying to take away Washington as the mascot of George Washington University.
Are they going to change the name?
Yeah, I know.
Look, Yale changes all these names, too.
Elihu Yale was a slave trader.
You'd think they'd change that at some point.
Lord of mercy.
Going down to Florida, down to University of Florida.
Yes.
Going to Atlanta.
I'm going to Ohio.
I'm going to...
I'll do USC in Southern California.
USC right here, yep.
And I'm going to Kentucky.
So we're going to be all around.
Unfortunately, not Denver.
But hey, put in a request through Young America's Foundation.
Maybe I'll get to go next semester.
That would be amazing.
And you get a whole tour this year.
It's so official.
It's going to be so fancy and fun.
And hopefully I won't get squirted by weird chemicals on my loafers again.
Bleach or anything?
Yeah.
Glitter on those loafers, right?
Did it never come off?
Yeah, you can still see it, actually.
Just a little hint of it.
Glitter is the herpes of the craft world.
Once you get it, it never goes away, guys.
I just found out my loafers have herpes.
That's...
That's upsetting.
Get a new pair.
Doesn't the God King pay you enough to buy a new pair?
Not a chance.
Are you kidding me?
I'll go to like the thrift store.
I can't believe that we're halfway through with this.
And I'm not halfway through my drink, so let's catch up.
No, gosh, come on.
Get on it.
It'll be much more interesting.
This is an episode of The Conversation.
We have these once a month where we get to talk to our amazing Daily Wire podcast host.
This month it is Michael Knowles.
Don't worry, next month it will be at Ben Shapiro, so it'll be much more interesting.
I've heard of that guy.
And we'll both be talking 10,000 times faster.
So our episode of The Conversation is live for everyone to watch everywhere.
I mean, everywhere.
Everywhere.
Everyone is able to watch it everywhere.
Myspace, Zanga, LiveJournal.
Oh, RIP. All right.
But only our amazing Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, along with that really cool Leftist Tears Tumblr, if there are annual subscribers.
So, click the link in our video description to ask those questions or sign up and be sure to tune in next month for that aforementioned episode with our editor-in-chief, alt-right Nazi Ben Shapiro.
That's him.
Okie dokie.
Danny says, here's another question.
After the issue with the trans-waxing situation...
Might want to recap that story.
I certainly don't want to, but I will.
Real quick.
How long do you think it will evolve from wax, Mom, I'm quoting here, so don't be mad, quote, wax my balls, you bigot, to, quote, abort my fetus, you sexist.
Just got to take a moment on that.
Really well-crafted question, sir.
Really well done.
Thanks for making me read that.
The story there, of course, is that some, like, sick pedophile guy who's pretending to be a woman walked into an immigrant's beauty salon in Canada and asked her to give him a Brazilian wax, which is literally not possible.
It's not physically possible.
He could get something called a manzillion.
I'm sorry I did all this research.
This does exist.
is the manzillion requires a different technique and different waxes than the Brazilian wax.
So he couldn't have gotten it even if they were willing to do it.
What it amounts to is this.
I'm sorry, I can't look at you while you're talking.
I know.
That's fine.
It's like we're in a confessional.
We'll just look separate places.
This guy goes in there and basically says to an immigrant woman...
Oh, it's disgusting.
He says, wax my genitals, you bigot.
And then he filed a complaint, tried to get her shut down, got him out of business, did this to 15 or 16 other places.
That many places?
Oh yeah, all throughout Canada.
He's a psycho.
And also apparently a sexual predator.
So, your question is, how long before we go from wax my balls, you bigot, to use your phrase, to abort my fetus, you sexist?
I think it's the opposite.
We're already there.
We're way past abort my fetus, you sexist.
First of all, we pretend right now that there's something called the Hyde Amendment that protects taxpayer funding from going to abortion services.
That doesn't exist because money is fungible.
So you can't just say, okay, Planned Parenthood, I'm going to give you half a billion dollars a year.
And you must only use it for this.
Yeah, you can only use this dollar on condoms, not on an abortion.
Or the mammograms that they don't do.
Or the mammograms that they pretend that they do, even though they don't.
But money is fungible.
You have money, right?
You have a pile of money that's tangible.
Then you put it into an ATM, and then you have money in your bank account, and then you get out different money.
You don't get the same bills.
Money is fungible.
So we are already paying for abortions.
And just this year, just in this presidential election, virtually every major Democratic candidate has endorsed explicit taxpayer funding for abortion through the explicit repeal of the Hyde Amendment, up to and including Joe Biden, the alleged old statesman, the alleged moderate in the race.
Who's had to apologize for his support for the Hyde Amendment.
That's right.
He's just apologizing for everything.
I mean, as he should.
He's got a lot to apologize for.
That's the culture we live in.
Ernest Hemingway describes going bankrupt as it happening gradually, then suddenly.
We had a gradual culture for a long time, and then it's suddenly become clear that we are way further to the left than we thought we were.
I have a follow-up to that because we're talking about some of the new polling that just came out on the Democratic side with the field, the packed field over there that's running for president against Donald Trump right now.
And Biden had been doing pretty well in the polls.
I credit that.
You and I have both been politicos.
We've run campaigns before.
I'm a geek when it comes to the breakdown of the numbers and the frequency of voters, etc.
I do wonder, based on your answer just then, it kind of triggered a thought that...
Joe Biden has dropped in the polls since he started apologizing for everything that he's done in the past.
But Elizabeth Warren is increasing and she's got some pretty cuckoo leftist ideas.
So what does that say that the Democratic base really wants?
Well, the issue is that Liz Warren is relatively new on the scene and she's always been pretty far left.
So she doesn't have to pivot because she's always been on the progressive wing of the party.
Whereas Biden has at times presented himself...
As a moderate.
Now, if you're a moderate in 1970, that makes you very conservative by today's standards.
Still, I agree with your point.
I think don't apologize.
It's the Kevin Spacey lesson.
It is the lesson of this graceless era that we're living in, is that you're just not allowed to apologize because nobody wants to forgive you.
There's an old New York expression, which is, deny till you die.
I mean, that is...
And frankly, President Trump is pretty good at this.
He'll say, I didn't think that.
Nah, I didn't.
I wasn't being serious when I said that.
Moving on, here we are.
I might tape when I said that.
No, I didn't.
That's right.
I didn't.
Forget about that.
And it's brilliant.
I mean, it's the only strategy that you can pursue right now because our society is graceless.
And Biden didn't get it.
He went weak-kneed.
He thought that he could win by apologizing, by kowtowing to the leftist mob.
It never, ever works.
And now he's paying the price.
Jessica says, do you have any advice for an aspiring teacher?
Despite the desire to want to impact student lives, the education system is wildly messed up.
Can a single teacher like me make a difference?
Absolutely.
I speak regularly to my kindergarten teacher.
One of my favorite teachers I ever had.
I was five years old.
Me too.
And we still talk a lot.
Well, it's my mom.
It was your mom.
That is true.
You talk to her like every day, basically.
I was homeschooled all 12 years.
Hashtag homeschool joke.
You know, I still talk to a lot of my teachers.
My kindergarten teacher, my first grade teacher I've talked to in recent years, my third grade teacher I've talked to in recent years, high school teachers I've still gone back and seen, who radically shaped my life, who were so charitable to me, who were so important and influential.
Yeah, my teachers have been some of the most important people in my life, so certainly you can have a huge impact.
It's a difficult educational system now, not even because of the teachers.
I don't even think the teachers are that left-wing.
I think it's the unions, the leadership of the teacher unions.
I think it's the administrations very often, or they're just politicians, basically.
And then you get a lot of mandates from the county and from the state, and these days even federal mandates, that you have to fight against.
And you've got to fight against it on the curriculum.
You've got to make sure you're teaching people real things.
Real disciplines.
Real academic disciplines.
Real scholarship.
And not just political ideology that masquerades as scholarship.
But I strongly encourage teachers.
Especially teachers who...
Something tells me if you're watching this show, you're not like the most left-wing teacher in the world.
So I really encourage it.
You could have more of an impact certainly than most politicians and most people who go on TV. I think that our education system would be much better off if actual teachers on the ground constantly rotated whoever was in charge of the union.
Yeah, right.
Or they'd just not be a teacher's union.
Just obliterate it all together, yeah.
Like, you know, like that Supreme Court decision that California teachers' union tends to ignore?
It's insane, the rigmarole that they're making people go through to try to...
To try to get out of the union.
To get themselves out, yeah.
It's insane.
All right, Keith says, Sure.
The problem is not that you're wrong about the leftists.
Your opinion of the leftists is almost certainly correct.
What I suspect the problem is that you're wrong about yourself.
We're usually right when we condemn other people because people are jerks.
But we tend to have a high-minded view of ourselves.
So we judge other people on their actions.
We judge ourselves by our intentions.
We forgive and excuse ourselves when we make mistakes, when we're uncharitable, when we're cruel.
And we only focus on that when we talk about other people.
So the way that you should view leftists or people you disagree with is with the recognition that you didn't create your life.
You're not responsible for your life.
Life is a gift that was given to you.
It's going to be taken away from you and very almost certainly you're not going to know when that is going to happen.
You are a broken person.
You have a fallen and imperfectable nature.
And we're all just trying to do our best, even people who are cruel, who have bad intentions.
They've got histories.
They've got stories.
They've got upbringings that probably would make you shudder.
This is the thing about prison.
I'm all for keeping the prisons filled.
I'm all for bringing back the death penalty.
I want real criminal justice.
I'm not soft on that.
And yet, I have a great deal of sympathy for the people in prison.
I've talked to ex-cons.
I've talked to people who've gone through that system.
And they all have horrific childhoods.
They all have horrific backgrounds.
Same thing with homeless people on the street.
Doesn't mean they're not dirty, rotten bums who are addicted to drugs and who are a drag on society.
Also, they've had horrible upbringings, usually.
And you have benefited.
I mean, you have had certain privileges and you've had certain hardships that other people haven't had.
The way to begin is humility.
If you begin with humility, that is, I think St.
Augustine said the four most important virtues are humility, humility, humility, and humility.
If you begin from that position, then you'll have a little bit of awe and wonder.
You'll kind of get a kick out of the world.
The left, instead of bothering you, which, you know, for some people, they're just so angry at the left all the time.
I'm not.
I'm usually entertained.
I'm usually getting a kick out of it.
It's a good laugh.
Yeah, it's a good laugh, and it's an opportunity for you to help somebody out by helping them see the world a little more clearly.
It's an opportunity rather than a burden.
I would advise, and I think you and I have had to do this, given that we've spent our adult lives in liberal meccas.
I'm a little older than you.
That's true, but I've only ever been in liberal places.
Other than my upbringing in southeastern Oklahoma, I've spent my entire adult life, which is far too long now.
I'm getting old, Michael.
In New York.
She's almost 25, Alicia.
In New York and L.A. Same with you.
Well, and then add in Yale, which is also a liberal mecca.
Yeah, yeah, no doubt.
Sometimes just befriend people.
Yeah.
And then find out their politics.
Or despite their politics, befriend them.
And then it will make it easier for you to not feel contempt towards them because of all the things that you just said.
It humanizes them a little bit.
And vice versa.
Then they won't have as much contempt towards you.
That is very true.
Just putting it out there.
It's called like fellowship and evangelism, kind of.
Where's the peace pipe?
Where's that Denver guy?
Chris says, hey Michael and Alicia.
Hey to you Chris.
I am getting ready for medical school interviews.
How should I answer the quote, your opinion on the current state of healthcare, close quote, without outing myself as a conservative?
Sidebar, I didn't even know that's a potential question when you're trying to get into medical school.
Why is that relevant to going to medical school?
What is your opinion on the current state of healthcare?
That's the question.
How should you answer that question?
Very carefully.
That's why.
One time, I got to meet Justice Scalia twice before he died.
It was unbelievable.
Really, the highlights of college.
And we would ask him a few questions.
Difficult questions.
How do you reconcile originalism with story decisis, with looking at court precedent?
How do you reconcile this and that?
And the best answer he gave was, very carefully, even one of the great, brilliant minds of our country had that answer.
You've got to be careful about it.
You've got to be a little clever.
Don't out yourself.
But don't lie.
So what's your opinion of the current state of healthcare?
There are many challenges.
It's broken.
Costs are too high.
There would be ways to expand access to healthcare.
Innovation is wonderful.
We're the greatest driver of healthcare innovation in the world.
Obviously we have the best healthcare system in the world.
That's a true answer.
A leftist hearing that wouldn't find anything objectionable about it.
Except the last one.
No, I think they would agree with that.
Really?
I think so.
It depends on how hardcore they were.
Maybe not.
Okay, maybe lay off that a little bit.
The real fear is if they get into asking you specific policy solutions, and if they do that, find a lawyer buddy.
I mean, that is like serious viewpoint discrimination, and even if it doesn't violate any particular law in whatever state you would be going to medical school in, that is a big issue that is real corruption of higher education, and you should make an issue of it.
Julian wants to know, I don't know, this might be Allie Beth Stuckey using a fake name as a Daily Wire subscriber named Julian, who wants to know, what are your biggest criticisms of Calvinism?
Hmm.
How much time do we have left in this?
Well, I say that because Allie is obviously an advocate for Calvinism.
She is.
She and I discuss this at length.
And this is something that she talked about on Ben's episode of the Sunday special that she was on, which everyone should go check out as well.
Without going too far into it, and I'm no scholar of Calvinism, I'm a Catholic...
The big criticism of Calvinism is that it is a form of fatalism.
It denies the will in many ways, and it sort of surrenders humanity to a sort of mindless fatalism.
Now, the response to that would say, you darn Catholics are Pelagian heretics.
You have a work-based theology, which is not true, and we could get into that at some point.
But But if Calvinism is only focused on grace and denies the role of the will, and then certain heresies, which were declared heresies 1,500 years ago, like the Pelagian heresy, deny grace and only focus on the role of will, what you need to have is true religion, which is the marriage of grace and will.
Dancing as though they're doing a formal dance at a ball.
And you see this most clearly in the Annunciation.
So when the angel comes down to Mary and says, Hail Mary, the Lord is with you.
You will conceive a child of the Holy Spirit.
And then all of heaven holds its breath.
Because the angel waits and Mary says, I am the Lord's servant, his will be done.
So that God comes all the way down the mountain.
All of grace is there in that scene.
And yet, so is Mary's will.
And Mary ascends to God's will.
And we may turn away from God's will.
We may turn away from our own salvation.
That is for us to do.
And this is denied by certain more modern Christian iterations and I am friends with people who have had abortions, multiple abortions, and multiple people who have had abortions.
Christians And I'll even expand that to the whole pro-life community who tend to be conservative at least.
I think Christians, conservatives, pro-lifers, I think we are the most judgmental people, except when we are the least judgmental people.
I had a guy.
I barely knew him.
We were kind of pals in college, but we weren't close at all.
Hadn't spoken for years and years and years.
Not after really freshman or sophomore year.
He called me because he was going to prison for a horrific crime.
I won't even go into it here.
Like the worst crimes you can possibly imagine.
I said, why are you calling me?
This was a guy who would give me grief about my politics in college because I was such a judgmental conservative.
And I've thought about that.
I said, why is he calling me?
And I think it's because...
We are very judgmental.
We have judgments about the world.
We think about the world.
We think about morality.
We think about virtue.
We think about human action.
We spend a lot of time thinking about them.
So we do have judgments.
And yet, because we spend all that time, there also comes the wisdom of human brokenness, human frailty.
There but for the grace of God go I. People I know have had abortions.
There but for the grace of God go I, either as the baby or as the mother.
Women I know who are wracked with regret and grief because of what they did.
I have a friend in New York, unbelievable Christian guy, born again, goes to daily mass.
He's a born again Catholic.
Usually we say born again and it refers to evangelicals.
When you're my people, evangelicals.
But he's a born again Catholic who goes to mass every day, wears an I Love Jesus cap.
And this guy was involved in crime, serious crime, like kill people kind of crime.
And he pointed out to me, St.
Paul was a murderer.
If St.
Paul was a murderer, persecuted, and killed Christians, and he becomes the apostle, such the apostle that he's just referred to as the apostle, then certainly there is redemption for women and mothers who have had abortions.
Alright, Heidi says, her boyfriend and her are currently reading Three to Get Married by Fulton Sheen.
Do you recommend any other books as marriage prep?
Yeah, I'm actually embarrassed to say I haven't read Three to Get Married, but I just love Fulton Sheen.
I mean, just go through his old TV shows, watch them on YouTube.
You'll go down a vortex, absolutely.
I didn't read any books for marriage prep.
I did marriage prep.
The Catholics had pre-cana, but there are other Protestant versions of that.
I do recommend that.
I found that really helpful.
The conversations with my priest were really helpful.
Conversations with married people were really helpful.
I asked my grandfather, who my grandparents had been married something like 70 years.
He was a captain in the Navy.
I asked him, what's the key?
This was on his 60th anniversary.
I said, what's the key to a happy marriage?
He said, shared experience, 54 months of pregnancy, patience, 54 months of pregnancy.
Yeah, 54 months of pregnancy.
And frequent absence, because he was deployed to Vietnam.
You know, he was a Navy man, so he was out.
That helps a little bit, too.
I would recommend, though, doing it.
I would recommend doing the marriage prep because...
Marriage isn't a book.
You're acting it every day.
You're putting it into your body.
It's your life.
So read whatever good books people recommend to you.
But I would practice.
It's much more a practice than an intellectual exercise.
And it seems as if you knew, you probably knew people that had been like in the newlywed stage.
My mom calls the first five years.
And then any therapist I've ever talked to say that like the 7 and the 10 year itch are real.
Talk to people at that stage and then talk to people at the 20 year stage because every stage of marriage is so different.
Right.
And differently relatable to people.
I can't remember what we read.
I'm coming up on 10 years and I can't remember it.
Do you have the itch?
No.
Okay, that's good.
I'm glad.
I don't know.
You just had a kid.
I just want to make sure you...
Not in the Marilyn Monroe movie either, by the way.
Yeah, right, right.
No, it refers to, like, therapists often refer to it as, like, you start to look at the other person and all the things that you used to love you now hate.
Yeah.
That happens around 7 and 10 years, they say.
It's just interesting.
Yeah.
Anyway, good luck with that.
And, you know, like Michael said earlier, get married and have lots of babies.
Hmm.
Okay, Jerry says his company released a guide of correct language regarding gender in the realm of healthcare with phrases like biological sex being banned.
I want to keep my job, but this is crazy.
Any advice?
Depends what your job is.
It depends how you have to use that language.
I mean, I would never use that language, and now I work here.
You know, I'm not working at Morgan Stanley or something, or someplace that would insist on that kind of ridiculous Orwellian language.
So it depends.
If they're saying around the water cooler you can't use the word sex, you have to use the word gender, which is a term that refers to grammar, not to human people.
I mean, they're not supposed to refer to humans.
Then I would just avoid the topic at the water cooler.
If, in official company missives, you're not allowed to use the term sex, you have to use the term gender for something that is going out publicly from the company, it's their company.
They can put out whatever they want.
Now, if what they're saying is that in your interpersonal communication, your emails, your text messages, the way you think, because that's what it ultimately comes down to, is not just speech codes, but speech codes or thought codes.
If it comes down to that, I certainly wouldn't be able to tolerate that.
All I've got is my consciousness.
All I've got is what I think of the world, the faculties that are mine.
And if I were told that I'm not allowed to think what I think or have the opinions that I have or even use my own speech, which is the human ability, right?
That's what separates us from the animals.
Then I would maybe start looking on ZipRecruiter.com.
I'd start looking for a new place because that is so oppressive.
I don't know how I could have a career at that sort of place.
And I don't know how HR would handle that.
I suspect I do know how HR would handle it.
The way HR should handle it is by protecting the liberties and the rights of the employee.
But these days I don't think that's how it works.
HR is always out for the company, folks.
Never the employee.
That's right.
Saw that in a few situations in the news the last couple years.
Life lesson there.
Joel says, traditionalist Knowles, and welcome back, Alicia.
Thanks, Joel.
It's good to be back.
Why do so many conservatives emphasize 2A and disregard 4A, mostly with regards to encryption backdoors, both Republicans and Democrats looking?
And warrantless cell phone searches.
We had this incident after San Bernardino terror attack where the FBI, I think, wanted to have backdoor access to the phones.
To the iPhone, yeah.
And Apple said, no, absolutely not.
We're not doing it.
And Apple made the right decision.
I mean, the minute that Apple says that they're actually going to open up the privacy for people who want to snoop in from the government, you have no consumer confidence in that product anymore.
So I think they made the right decision.
The Fourth Amendment is a little tricky, though, because while it does protect certain rights to privacy, it doesn't protect some sort of general privacy.
And what does general privacy even mean in an age where we put everything that we say and do and think and every photo that we...
On the internet.
I think that's a little bit why.
The Second Amendment is very clear from the conservative coalition perspective.
Don't forget, the conservative coalition is diverse.
It includes traditionalists, which probably I fall a little bit more in that camp.
It includes libertarians, at least last time I checked.
It includes the religious right.
It includes the neoconservatives.
It includes more populist types, all of whom have very different ideas from one another.
They all basically agree on the guns.
They all basically agree we have a right to protect ourselves.
We have a natural right to protect ourselves.
It comes from natural law.
We have a traditionalist inherited right to guns.
So that one's pretty easy.
But what privacy means precisely is Highly contested among those different branches of the conservative movement.
And I think that's why where you might get someone like Rand Paul or Mike Lee or generally the libertarians to talk on and on and on and on about that Fourth Amendment, the other parts of that coalition are just less interested in it.
Or wide-ranging in their opinion.
Right.
One of them is the search and seizure part of the Fourth Amendment and how previously, even if you were under investigation, they could come seize your assets.
And that is so disputed on the right.
I was very surprised by lots of lawyer friends of mine when that decision came down.
However, I was like, oh, wow, I didn't expect that opinion of you.
Or the right to pornography.
Pornography is everywhere.
It is completely ubiquitous.
With the advent of the internet, it went onto every computer, and then nobody's ever going to talk about it.
This is like the silent epidemic in America.
Virtually every libertarian I talk to says everyone has a right to view whatever pornography.
It's crazy to criminalize pornography.
And then most conservatives I talk to or traditionalists, that ilk or religious right, say absolutely there's no right to pornography.
Pornography is awful.
It harms the people who do it.
It's incredibly tempting.
I mean, it is like the great temptation.
So even people who oppose it will look at it.
Get rid of it.
Just ban it.
Totally get rid of it and block it.
And that's a legitimate disagreement on the right, and it largely comes down to first principles, and I don't know that you're going to reconcile the traditionalists to the libertarians on that issue, or even some others.
Right, we're in the final countdown.
So, if you are a subscriber, get your questions in now.
Head on over to the chat box at dailywire.com to enter your question, or become a subscriber.
If you become an annual subscriber, then you get this awesome Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Which, did you love Tumbly at Backstage?
I so loved Tumbly.
That's the name I've given our inflatable Leftist Tears Tumblr that we made some poor intern run around in all night.
It is the perfect name if you were not at the Daily Wire backstage.
That thing must have cost like thousands of dollars.
It wasn't bad.
Okay, well that's good.
But I don't care if it cost $20,000.
It was worth it.
Giant inflatable Tumblr fighting a giant inflatable Crowder mug with a giant inflatable Stogie.
It was the highlight of the night as far as I'm concerned.
I think it's over on the Daily Wire Instagram page, too.
People have to go check it out.
But then you also get to ask a question.
So become a subscriber today.
This question comes from an amazing subscriber, Daryl, who says, Dear Sir Maddow, from a Catholic perspective, do you believe that there is a point of no return wherein God decides that he has had enough of a person sinning and ceases to extend his mercies?
Well, for some people, I think, you know, mercy would be ending it all right now.
The sweet meteor of death might be a mercy to some people, in so much as, you know, if you die in a state of grace, you get to go up to heaven, that's pretty good.
Whereas, for some people, a very, very long life doesn't seem merciful at all for people who are frittering away their life and end in sort of self-destruction.
Certainly in the Bible we see God losing his patience with certain cities, but this also is in part a function of human will because when God is preparing to destroy cities, he'll say, alright, if I can find 40 righteous people, Then I won't destroy it.
You can't find those 40, can you?
If I can find 20, right?
If I can find 10 righteous people.
But they can't because people get so rotten.
So I'm not too worried about the sweet meteor of death.
I have great love for providence.
I have great trust in God and great faith.
Russell Kirk writes about this, the guy who wrote The Conservative Mind.
And in his read of Edmund Burke, he says that providence, the trust in God's plan, the trust that this world makes sense, is fundamental, essential to the conservative point of view.
And even if you think that you're an atheist or an agnostic or something, Just the idea that this world makes sense.
There's a purpose.
It's not just random craziness that doesn't mean anything.
A tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Just that belief is essential to conservatism.
And on the left right now, you see chaos.
This idea that there is no sense to the world.
It's not going toward anything.
I always see these articles, you know, a meteor hurled past the earth.
Thank goodness it didn't hit us.
I didn't think it was going to hit us.
You know, it doesn't seem like it's our time just yet.
That's a fundamental distinction.
I'm not worried about that meteor of death coming and crushing us.
We don't know the time or the hour.
We don't know when it's going to happen.
But when it does, I trust it'll be the right time.
And I'm sure we'll see some Sweet Meteor of Death 2020 bumper stickers like we did back in 2016.
Whoever came up with that is making some good money right now.
This is our final question on this episode of The Conversation.
This is our final question.
I had barely any of my whiskey.
Chug, chug, chug.
That's what they say at Yale, right?
I don't know.
I'm a college dropout.
All right.
This question comes from Tyler, who says, I am a criminal justice and homeland security major.
My professors and my criminology continue to push Black Lives Matter movement, and one is really pushing us to go to a BLM rally.
Do you have any advice?
Have you considered transferring schools?
Have you considered, I don't know, major in English and then go join the police academy or something?
That's really awful, though it's part and parcel of a movement you see generally in academia, which is a lot of departments hate the thing that they are studying.
So if you're studying criminal justice, It appears that they're endorsing ideologies that disparage criminal justice, that undercut criminal justice.
You see this with American Studies.
American Studies, ironically, hates America.
You see this with a lot of different departments.
So that's too bad.
I certainly wouldn't go to the rally, but if you're going to get booted from the program or you're going to fail out of the program by making a spectacle of yourself, then...
You might want to keep your head down a little bit.
I wouldn't do anything to violate your integrity.
I wouldn't do anything that you don't believe.
But you don't always need to showboat to prove that you're hardcore, that you really stand by your beliefs.
You've got to be clever, innocent as a dove, and wise as a serpent.
And I guarantee you there are one or two professors at least in that department, and probably more than that, who think that what the political leftist activists are doing is awful.
I would seek out those professors because they're going to be important to your education.
All right.
That's it.
That's it.
We made it.
It's been a whole hour of this episode of The Conversation with Michael Knowles.
Thank you so much for joining us, everyone.
And be sure to subscribe for next month's episode of The Conversation over at thedailywire.com.
And that'll be featuring our very own Ben Shapiro.
It's great to be back.
I'm Alicia Krause.
I'm Michael Knowles.
You want the rest of my whiskey?
Sure.
We'll see you next time.
See you next time.
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