All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 29, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:50
Ep. 407 - TrUmP eRoDeS tRuSt In OuR iNsTiTuTiOnS!

James Comey broke FBI policy when he leaked memos of meetings with Trump. MSNBC apologizes after running an unverified report on the President. And AOC shows breathtaking ignorance of our Constitution. Plus, the Mailbag! Date: 08-29-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The DOJ watchdog concludes that former FBI Director James Comey broke FBI policy when he leaked memos of his meetings with President Trump.
An MSNBC host is forced to apologize after running a completely unverified report on President Trump's financial dealings.
And fresh-faced socialist Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez returns with a new video showing her breathtaking ignorance of our Constitution and system of government.
Oh, and by the way...
It now turns out that a second camera outside of Jeffrey Epstein's jail cell wasn't functioning on the night of his alleged suicide.
But please, please, tell me more about how President Trump is eroding trust in our institutions.
We'll examine all of that and more, plus the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
All of the stories in the news today, I think President Trump may be the thing that we can most trust in our institutions, which is really sort of a scary thought, but it's not really a defense of the president's tweets or the president's rhetoric or the way the president conducts himself in public.
It just tells you how absolutely eroded our faith has become in institutions because of the people who've been running them for decades.
We will get into all of that.
But first, I've got to tell you why I look and feel so good.
And you know the reason why.
The reason why is Bowling Branch.
Bowling Branch Sheets.
Everything Bowling Branch makes from bedding to blankets is made from pure 100% organic cotton, which means they start out super soft and they get even softer over time.
Buying directly from them, there is no middleman, so you are paying wholesale prices essentially.
One of the perks of my job is on rare occasions I've gotten to stay at really nice hotels on the road, and one thing I noticed about the nice hotels is the bedding just feels so much better.
It's like completely unlike the regular old cheap motels that I would stay at when I'm picking up the tab.
And so I felt this a couple years ago.
And I thought, oh great, I should register for this when I get married and get these really nice sheets and blankets and things.
Turns out luxury sheets can cost up to like $1,000 in the store.
But what Bowling Branch does is they cut out that middleman.
They're only a couple hundred bucks.
They are unbelievable quality.
You are getting luxury for an incredible deal.
And Everybody who tries Bowlin Branch loves them.
That's why they have thousands of five-star reviews.
That's why I love them, too.
Shipping is free.
You can try them for 30 nights.
If you don't love them, you can send them back for a refund, but you will not want to send them back.
There is no risk, no reason not to give them a try.
To get started right now, my listeners get $50 off your first set of sheets.
$50 I'm giving you.
Go to BowlinBranch.com, promo code Michael, M-I-C-H-A-E-L. BowlinBranch.com for $50 off your first set of sheets.
B-O-L-L and branch.com, promo code Michael, ballandbranch.com, promo code Michael.
For years now, we have heard that President Trump is eroding faith in our institutions.
And the reason we've heard that is twofold.
One, because President Trump is an unconventional sort of fella who tweets a lot of things that we don't expect from our politicians.
And the other reason is faith in our institutions has been declining for years.
There was a 2018 survey from the Edelman Trust Barometer which showed plummeting trust in institutions.
So everybody in the chattering class conflated correlation with causation.
They conflated the fact that those things are occurring at the same time.
With the cause of it and blaming President Trump for that.
This is in the left.
This is the media.
This is the anti-Trump right.
This is the establishment right.
They're all blaming Trump.
But I don't think that's the case.
I mean, in some maybe marginal way, President Trump is eroding faith in our institutions.
But I think he's actually only doing that among people who don't have faith in our institutions to begin with.
Namely the left.
I would like to propose an alternate theory.
An alternative theory, rather.
I don't think President Trump is really eroding faith in our institutions.
I think that Trump is an expression of our distrust in our institutions, like they're getting it exactly backwards.
I think that the federal agencies and the media and the left have so eroded trust in our institutions for decades that the only way that we can respond to that...
Is by electing someone who did not have political experience, who does not come from a political class, who does not have a perfectly defined ideology, who does not go to the sort of think tank beltway circuit, who hasn't spent his whole life running for officer as a lobbyist, a guy who is an expression of the popular culture, so much so that he's been a pop culture icon for 40 years.
That is President Trump.
That is an expression of Of distrust.
That is not the cause of distrust.
And you see it in the biggest news of the day.
Biggest news of the day right now is the DOJ's inspector general came out with a report that James Comey, former FBI director, probably the most sanctimonious guy in all of Washington, violated FBI policy when he leaked memos about his meetings with President Trump.
So between January and April 2017, before Comey got canned, he had these meetings with President Trump, and he wrote memos detailing what happened in these meetings, and those memos contained some information.
I mean, who knows if they're reliable, because we know Comey's a liar, but even let's say they are reliable, they said that Trump asked Comey to be loyal to him, and that Trump asked Comey to drop the FBI investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
Again, it's hard for us to know if that's true or not.
Sort of beside the point.
Weeks after Comey was fired, Comey sent those memos to his friend, Dan Richman.
And he instructed his friend to, in turn, send those memos to the New York Times, to a specific reporter at the New York Times.
So Comey didn't want to leak it himself because he's a coward in a dirtbag.
He sent it to his buddy, lawyer, who he then instructed to send it over to the New York Times.
Comey then also failed to notify the FBI after he was dismissed in May of 2017 that he had kept some of those memos in a safe at his own home.
Completely violated FBI policy.
Did Comey apologize?
No.
Did Comey admit that he did wrong?
No.
Comey, who we had given stewardship of one of our important institutions, the FBI, totally spun it, totally lied.
This was his response.
He tweeted out, the DOJ IG, quote, found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the memos to members of the media.
Then he goes on, I don't need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a sorry we lied about you would be nice.
I got a message for James Comey and that message is not sorry we lied about you and that message is not happy birthday, but it is two words.
The issue isn't the classification of the memos.
The issue is the leaks.
The issue is the fact that he kept those memos in a safe at his own home, and the issue is that he leaked it to the media.
The issue is not telling the FBI that he had the memos.
So forget Comey's spin.
And actually, you don't even need to take my word for it.
Comey's being dragged right now by left-wing media as well, CNN, the Associated Press, because there's just no defending him.
The DOJ watchdog came out pretty clearly and said that this guy broke the rules and it was a serious infraction of the rules.
Let's quote the IG directly.
Inspector General writes, quote, even when these employees, employees of the FBI and the federal agencies, even when they believe that their most strongly held personal convictions might be served by an unauthorized disclosure, the FBI depends on them not to disclose sensitive information. the FBI depends on them not to disclose sensitive information.
Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility.
By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees and the many thousands more former FBI employees who similarly have current FBI employees and the many thousands more former FBI employees who similarly have access to or Sets a dangerous example.
But Comey won't just own up to it.
Comey won't apologize because Comey is a symbol of the corrupt, corroded We're good to go.
This is from the Inspector General's report.
He writes, quote, The FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly,
as Comey himself noted in his March 20, 2017, congressional testimony.
Comey is admitting the principle here.
You can't just leak sensitive information from the federal government willy-nilly because you really believe in something.
That's a quick way for institutions to fall apart.
Which is what we're seeing.
We're seeing the faith in the institutions fall apart.
Not because of the president, primarily because of the president's opponents.
Not just in the federal government, though.
Look over at the media.
You know, on MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell has been forced to apologize after running a completely unverified report insinuating that the president is a lying traitor to his country.
Here is Lawrence with the big report.
Stop the hammering.
Stop the hammering out there.
Who's got a hammer?
Oh, sorry.
Apparently there was hammering in the control room when we turned to Lawrence for his report.
So here is Lawrence with the actual, big, super serious, albeit unverified, scoop that he had the other night.
It could mean, if true, and I stress if true, because this is a single source who has told me that the Deutsche Bank obtained tax returns, which they do have, of Donald Trump's, show that the president pays very little income tax.
That's probably not going to be very surprising to people, probably not going to be especially politically damaging since he ran, saying, I try to pay as little as possible.
Then there's the other part.
The loan documents.
And that is part of what this subpoena is going after.
And this single source close to Deutsche Bank has told me that Donald Trump's loan documents there show that he has co-signers.
That's how he was able to obtain those loans.
And that the co-signers are Russian oligarchs.
What?
Bombshell!
Big if true.
Whoa!
They're still going with the Russian collusion narrative.
Can you believe it?
Years later, after it was debunked by the Mueller investigation, which they put all of their hopes into, completely debunked, no collusion, no conspiracy with the Russian government, they are still going with it because they have nothing else to do.
I mean, they're hoping for a recession.
They're praying that the economy tanks so that they have something to run against.
Something to run on.
But so far, they don't have that, so they're still going with this imaginary narrative.
But how could they go with the collusion narrative if the collusion narrative was debunked by the Mueller report?
They would just have to make it up, which is exactly what Lawrence O'Donnell is doing right here.
They don't have any evidence of it, so either O'Donnell constructed it in his own mind, or some guy that he knows at Deutsche Bank gave him bad information that is completely unverified, completely uncorroborated.
He runs it anyway, which is why Lawrence O'Donnell was forced to give a retraction the next night.
Last night on this show, I discussed information that wasn't ready for reporting.
I repeated statements a single source told me about the president's finances and loan documents with Deutsche Bank, saying if true, as I discussed the information, was simply not good enough.
I did not go through the rigorous verification and standards process here at MSNBC before repeating what I heard from my source.
Had it gone through that process, I would not have been permitted to report it.
I should not have said it on air or posted it on Twitter.
I was wrong to do so.
This afternoon, attorneys for the president sent us a letter asserting the story is false.
They also demanded a retraction.
Tonight we are retracting the story.
Yeah, that's right, you are.
Damn right you're retracting that story.
Not because Lawrence O'Donnell has some integrity, not because he, if he had integrity, he wouldn't have run the story in the first place.
He's not even really apologizing here.
He's saying, well, you know, the president's lawyers demanded we run a retraction, and so we are going to run a retraction.
Obviously, he's pretty afraid of Trump's lawyers.
I don't know that Trump is going to sue You don't want a lot of this kind of information to come out in Discovery.
But the threat is very real.
Obviously, O'Donnell should never have run this story.
And so he's running scared and he's pulling it.
But he couldn't even just fully retract the story.
He had to kind of mealy-mouth negate his own retraction.
We don't know whether the information is inaccurate.
But the fact is, we do know.
It wasn't ready for broadcast.
And for that, I apologize.
Oh, we don't know.
Look, in America, according to Lawrence O'Donnell, in America, according to Bob Mueller, in America, according to the left, when it suits their purposes, you are guilty until proven innocent.
So we don't know.
Hey, look, I got a report from a friend of mine that Lawrence O'Donnell still beats his wife.
Now, I don't know if that's true, okay?
This has not been corroborated.
This has not been verified.
So I don't know.
But I don't know that it's not true.
Okay?
I cannot say definitively that Lawrence O'Donnell doesn't still beat his wife.
So I'm just, look, obviously I would never report that Lawrence O'Donnell still beats his wife because it's not verified and it's not corroborated.
I'm just, just, just want to remind you all, I don't know that he doesn't still beat his wife.
Okay, I don't know that President Trump has been fully exonerated.
On colluding, not just with foreigners in Russia, I don't know that he hasn't colluded with Martians to take over the earth through Area 51.
I don't know that.
He hasn't been fully exonerated of that.
So I'm just saying, you know, I'm just, look, I'm just, I'm just saying.
And by the way, even this bogus kind of weak retraction that he posted is the typical leftist formula, right?
Lawrence O'Donnell tweets out, I've got the scoop.
Trump colluded with the Russians.
Tens of thousands of retweets, tens of thousands of likes, all the blue check marks, all the celebrities posting about it.
Then he tweets his retraction.
A few hundred retweets.
This is as of last night.
Okay, it doesn't matter what the retraction is.
It's like you run the story on page A1, and then you run the retraction on page Z75. No one's going to see the retraction.
And I guarantee you, of the people who saw this story, The vast majority of them didn't notice the retraction, didn't pay attention to the retraction.
And even if they did, they're not going to believe the retraction because the shock of the story was so big that that's what's going to stick in your mind.
I wonder why we don't have faith in the media.
I wonder why we don't have faith in our institutions.
Then we go to our institutions of lawmaking.
Our friend is back.
AOC is back.
Not one day after I tweeted out the strange coincidence that immediately after she fired her chief of staff, she went radio silent and stopped appearing in the newspapers.
Now, one or two days after that, she starts making a spectacle of herself again, because I guess she doesn't want it to become clear that her fired chief of staff, Psychot Jagrabarty, was the whole brains of the operation.
And I use the brains of the operation very, very liberally here.
AOC has come out with a new video to tell us that the Electoral College is a sham.
One of our nation's oldest institutions.
She says we need to get rid of it.
The Electoral College has worked well for 232 years, but AOC says it's no good, so it's gone.
Over that time that we've had the Electoral College, we've become the richest, freest, most equitable, most just nation in the history of the world.
But, you know, AOC doesn't like it, so we've got to get rid of it.
The trouble is, AOC doesn't seem to know what the Electoral College is.
It's true.
I'm not taking it back.
It's bogus.
It's a scam.
And like, it's not just, it's not even about rural voters versus urban voters.
That's the thing about the electoral college.
It's actually not about rural voters versus urban voters.
Stop.
So the thing I learned, the main thing I took away from this video, is not that AOC doesn't know what the Electoral College is, because I assumed she didn't know what the Electoral College is or much about our government.
The main thing I took away from it is that AOC can't pronounce the word rural.
She sounds like Jenna Maroney on 30 Rock, and she sounds like when everyone tries to pronounce Jenna's new screenplay, The Rural Juror.
Coming up, I'll be talking to the girly show star, Jenna Maroney, about her upcoming project, The Rural Juror.
The Rural Juror.
This is not about rural voters.
This is about...
Democracy.
I don't know.
So AOC then goes on to get to, I guess, something vaguely resembling a point.
If you cared about the voices of rural voters, you would allow all of...
You would allow all rural voters to come together and to have all of their votes counted.
But instead...
If your state is a blue state and you're a rural voter, your vote is essentially erased.
And so for all those Republicans that are like, oh, blah, blah, blah, this helps us.
What about all of those Republican voters in, for example, New York or in California who feel like their votes don't matter?
I suppose if they're in a popular vote, everyone's vote would count equally and we wouldn't give Essentially affirmative action to a very few small band of voters.
Okay, since you asked AOC, I will say as a conservative, a Republican in a blue state, actually formerly, you know, lived in New York most of my life, I love the Electoral College.
Keep it.
Thanks for asking my opinion.
I'm glad you want to know what we think.
Keep the Electoral College.
It's great.
What she's saying is not true.
What's, what's so funny is she's admitting that rural voters, rural, rural voters are Republicans and conservatives generally.
Now this isn't true across the board.
There are plenty of rural voters who are Democrats, but she's basically just saying, no, we're going to give up all the rural voters.
We're going to keep all of the city voters.
The problem with her analysis is not, is not even on the weight of the votes itself.
It's true.
If you live in a smaller state, for instance, it doesn't have to be rural or metropolitan, but if you just live in a smaller state, your vote, given the electoral college, does carry greater weight than if you lived in a larger state.
The reason for this is because of how the electoral college is set up.
It takes into account The states themselves and also the population of the states.
So it takes into account, right, the Senate.
Every state gets two senators.
And then it takes into account the House of Representatives, which is apportioned based on population.
But let's take AOC's logic to its logical conclusion.
If AOC is right, then we need to abolish the Senate.
Forget about the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is pretty even.
I mean, the Electoral College is a pretty good representation of the popular population.
Representation of the country, of the populace generally.
The Senate is not.
The Senate is a representation of the states.
Every state gets two votes, whether you're Rhode Island or whether you're California.
So if you really want direct democracy, which is what she's talking about, then you forget the Electoral College.
You have to abolish the Senate.
She's not willing to go that far yet, probably because she wants to run for Senate against Kirsten Gillibrand in a few years.
But What this belies is not just that she doesn't understand the electoral college, she doesn't understand federalism.
She doesn't understand what our country is.
She seems to think that our country is called the United Individuals of America.
The United Population of America.
It's not.
It's the United States of America.
We have a federal system.
I wish I didn't have to explain this to a representative in our federal government.
But what federalism does is it divides power between the federal power and the states and local communities.
And it divides power between the different branches of government.
The legislative, the judiciary, and the executive.
And it divides power between the people.
And the states.
And the federal government.
We have balances of power in this country.
We're not just all spread out individuals ready to be clobbered by the federal power that AOC wants to expand.
Then she goes on to try to make this a racial issue or a sexual issue or in some other way a grievance intersectional matter.
And for all these folks that say the Electoral College is to instill fairness, well, we literally only select one very narrow group to allow their votes to count more than other people.
Why don't we give Indian reservations an electoral vote?
Why don't we give Puerto Rico and U.S. territories, U.S. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of US citizens have zero representation.
Why don't we give them an electoral vote?
Why don't we accommodate our democracy for black Americans who were disenfranchised and in many ways continue to be disenfranchised for hundreds of years?
We don't give Native American nations a vote because they're sovereign nations.
So that's why.
We don't give Puerto Rico a vote because it's not a state, and Puerto Rico doesn't pay any taxes.
And we don't give black people multiple votes because they're people, like all of us.
You might not think that they're people, but we think they're people, and so they get the same votes as all the other people.
Good lordy.
You see, she hasn't followed any of these ideas to any sort of logical end.
She's just trying to gin up grievance.
What about the Native Americans?
What about them?
If a Native American assimilates into American society, doesn't live as a member of a sovereign nation, they can do whatever they want.
What about Puerto Rico?
I don't know.
If a Puerto Rican moves to Florida, then you get to vote.
But Puerto Rico is not a state, and Florida is a state, and we're the United States of America.
Well, why don't black people get seven votes?
What?
What are you talking about?
Then she goes on and promotes one of the most pernicious canards of all, that she suggests that the Electoral College is really, it's so illegitimate because it was only set up to protect slavery.
We don't do any of that.
We only consider fairness for a very small band.
And frankly, this original compromise was to accommodate slave owners.
Yep, not true.
Completely put that away with the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
This is a persistent legend, but it is not true.
You don't need to take my word for it.
You don't even need to take conservatives' word for it.
You can go to the left-wing newspaper, par excellence, the New York Times.
The New York Times ran a good piece on this by Sean Wilentz, who is an historian who had actually previously written a book asserting this very legend that AOC was talking about, and he had to amend that.
He had to edit that in the second edition of his book, and he wrote a New York Times op-ed about it.
The Electoral College was not about accommodating slave owners.
How do I know that?
The Electoral College, approved by the Constitutional Convention, counted the electors by combining the House and the Senate.
So the number of representatives you get in the House plus the Senators, that's your electoral apportionment.
Now, by including the House there, that helped the bigger states.
By including, right, because they have a bigger population.
By including the Senate there, that helped the smaller states because they get outsized representation for their smaller size.
Why did they protect the states?
Well, one, because it's United States and the states are different.
But also, the states would not sign on if Rhode Island's vote was going to get completely washed out by California.
I mean, this is true today.
There are big differences between, I don't know, Oklahoma and California.
There are big differences between Rhode Island and California, for that matter, even though they might vote the same way.
They have very different interests and they have different culture and different politics.
It's completely unfair.
It's completely out of step with our political tradition.
To just destroy the representation of Rhode Island in the federal government.
So there was a compromise which came to the Electoral College.
Now, the slave-owning states were not thrilled about this.
The slave-owning states wanted it just to be based on population because they would have had the three-fifths compromise involved in that calculation, which counted their slave population, at least three-fifths of it, for apportionment to give them More representation in the federal government, and if that were the way that we elected presidents, to give them more control over electing presidents.
There's this really silly idea that the three-fifths compromise is offensive to black people and the descendants of slaves because it only valued black people as three-fifths of a person.
Actually, the opposite is true.
The more just agreement that could have been come up with is to not count the black slaves at all.
That's what the abolitionists wanted.
They didn't want to count black slaves as any bit of a person for the purpose of politics because it gave the slave-owning states an outsized role in the federal government, outsized power.
The idea was if you don't have political rights, then you shouldn't be counted as part of the population.
And if you are going to be counted as part of the population, then you shouldn't be held as slaves.
You should have political rights.
And the Three-Fifths Compromise was a way to form a nation with that great tension even from the very beginning.
So that was the direct election, just based on the apportionment of the population, was defeated.
That was defeated pretty early on by people who feared mob rule.
Once that was defeated, the most ardently pro-slavery states actually opposed the electoral college.
North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia opposed the proposal.
Also, under the initial apportionment of the Electoral College, the slave-holding states only would have held 39 out of 92 electoral votes.
So they didn't dominate the presidential elections.
Also, and this is important to look at the effects of the Electoral College, the Electoral College didn't really seem to tip any election during slavery, during slave times, except possibly one, which was the election of John Quincy Adams in 1824.
John Quincy Adams being maybe the most ardent anti-slavery crusader of his age.
And he lost the popular vote and the electoral vote to the pro-slavery Andrew Jackson.
And because that election was ultimately decided after great contest in the House of Representatives, it went to John Quincy Adams.
So the only time that the electoral college during slave days would have really weighed in on this question, it helped the anti-slavery cause and an anti-slavery candidate.
Now, I don't expect AOC to know that.
I also don't expect her to be in Congress, and I don't expect her to be considered the future of the party by the head of the Democratic National Convention.
But she is directly undermining trust in an American institution, the Electoral College, an important one and a long-standing one.
And she's undermining trust in Congress just by being there.
It's so, so disingenuous to blame President Trump for eroding trust in our institutions.
We can't even keep a high-level sex trafficker in jail.
Now, they say it's a suicide, even though he's got broken bones in his neck that are more likely from strangulation, and even though the guards just happened to fall asleep at exactly the same time, and even though the camera didn't work, now we're finding out a second camera outside of his cell didn't even work.
That's why we don't have trust in institutions, because the institutions are failing us.
The reason we don't have trust in our institutions is because they have been hollowed out and corrupted from within for decades and decades and decades.
That ain't Trump's fault.
H.L. Mencken said democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard.
And we elected President Trump because of these issues.
So you want to blame him for the tweets?
Fine.
You want to blame him for further reducing our trust in institutions?
Okay, fair enough to have that argument.
But don't blame him for the decline in trust.
The decline in trust is the reason that we got Trump in the first place.
Speaking of eroding our trust in institutions, we've quickly got to get to eroding our trust in language.
Then we got to get to the mailbag.
But first, Before I get to the difference between non-binary gender and lesbians, and whether non-binary people can be lesbians, and how we can't even have faith in our perception of reality itself anymore, it seems, in this country...
The Daily Wire has turned four years old.
It identifies as four years old.
And it actually is four years old.
As a thank you to our fans, we are giving away one month of our premium monthly subscription to anyone who uses the code BIRTHDAY. For all of August, which is quickly winding down as we celebrate this milestone, we've been giving away a free first month for new premium monthly subscribers.
Again, just use that code BIRTHDAY. Time is running out.
There are only two days left to get this deal, so subscribe today and come join in on the fun.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
We got to get to the mailbag, but first we've got to touch on this story because this is the question that is really on all of our minds.
Can you be non-binary, whatever that is, and a lesbian?
A few non-binary lesbians explain.
So can you be non-binary and lesbian?
This is something I often get asked because when you identify as non-binary you're saying that you're not female and if you're not female and you're attracted to women does that make you a lesbian?
I think it's sort of disingenuous to claim that you can't be both non-binary and a lesbian because you can definitely have an authentic lesbian experience as a non-binary person.
Because at the end of the day they are terms, they are linguistic tools used to describe an experience that already exists.
So someone telling me that I can't be a non-binary lesbian doesn't mean anything because I already am one and I'm just using the language that I have available to me to describe that.
There is so much bad philosophy in here.
And these women probably earnestly believe it.
But it's worth getting to because this is a video making the rounds on the internet and it does reflect a serious confusion going on in the culture.
To begin, the lesbian experience can be authentic among non-binary people.
The reason for that is because the lesbian experience is authentic and the non-binary experience or the perception that you are neither male nor female is inauthentic.
The lesbian part is real.
The non-binary part is not real.
Why?
That's because sex is real, and gender, as a distinct human category, is imaginary.
It's completely fiction.
It is dreamed up by people who want to make a distinction without a difference.
So these women, these lesbians, realize that there's a contradiction here, but they don't care.
This is the triumph of the will over the intellect.
They're lesbians in the sense that they're women who are sexually attracted to women, and they have authentic lesbian experiences because despite what they say, they actually are women.
But they also want to say that they are not women.
So over the intellect, over the reason, which shows them that they are women who have sex with other women, is this will, which is to say, I want to be a woman who has sex with other women, but I also don't want to be a woman, and I'm going to do both.
They're going to presume to force their will on others.
You know, the reason we have reason, the reason we use reason, is because it's objective.
We are reasoning about things that are outside of ourselves, so I can communicate what I think about something outside of me to you, and then you, using your faculties of reason, can try to understand that, and we can have communication and talk about it.
If it's just will, there's no communication.
You're just grunting brute animals in a forest, basically.
You're not referring to anything objective.
You couldn't perceive anything anyway because we're only talking about our willfulness, what we will have to be true.
And this is called bullying.
These women perceive this as bullying, but they're actually getting the bullying backwards.
So my personal experience with the lesbian community since coming out as non-binary has been rather dismal.
A lot of lesbians that I've encountered, especially on dates, haven't accepted my identity as something that they are interested in dating or accepting, to the point where some women have It's quite frustrating.
It's quite frustrating that the lesbians want to date women.
Why do the lesbians get to date women when I don't want them to?
That's what this woman is saying.
She's saying, look, I don't want lesbians to be attracted to women.
I want them to be attracted to this imaginary category that I've invented.
There is bullying going on, but it's bullying in the other direction.
Lesbians like girls.
So if you say you're not a girl, then by definition, lesbians are not going to be interested in you.
And this woman has a real frustration.
The real frustration is deep down.
She knows she's still a girl.
So she thinks it's unfair that lesbians are not interested in her because she is a girl.
But there's a difference between what she feels or what she wants to put out to the world and what she's presenting and what is true.
Right?
She knows deep down she's a girl.
But she's putting out to the world that she's not a girl.
But all the lesbian has to go on is that you're saying you're not a girl.
And if you're not a girl, then the lesbian's not attracted to you.
And I thought we've just spent 20 years saying that lesbians are allowed to love whoever they want.
But now you're saying they're not allowed to love whoever they want if it interferes with your willfulness.
If you insist by going by a male name or by some androgynous name like Skylar or something like that, then this lesbian is not going to perceive you as a woman and she's not going to be attracted to you.
This is the extreme of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
You can be a lesbian or you can be a man or you can at least pretend to be a man, but you cannot be a lesbian and a man.
And you see what they're saying here is, well, it's all just words.
It's all words, words, words.
Right.
Words are symbols that reflect reality.
That's what words are.
And the reason that the left so manipulates language, is always trying to change language and pervert language and pervert the meaning of words, is because they hate the reality underneath.
They are trying to insist on their own fiction.
They are using words to try to construct a reality of words.
Which is really a fantasy, rather than what conservatives do and what people should do, which is using words to express the objective reality.
Not to try to create a fantasy universe, but using those words, which are symbols, to express the reality itself.
These non-binary lesbians have my sympathy, but it is easily fixed if they just make their language correspond to reality, you non-binary lesbians.
All right.
Let's get to the mailbag quickly in the time we have left.
I'm going to fly through these.
Justin.
Hi, Michael.
I've been hearing a lot lately about how the Democratic Party and the Republican Party supposedly switched.
I have no knowledge of this and was hoping you could shed some light and share your knowledge.
Thanks for all you do.
Yes, this is a legend that is put forth by Democrats because they don't want to own up to the fact that they are members of just an absolutely terrible political party with a history of human misery and a party that was founded by It's the oldest continuously extant political party in the world, and it's the party that defended slavery, and Jim Crow, and the KKK, and Redlining, and all of those things.
So what they have to do, and you'll hear this usually from baby boomers, is they'll say, yeah, well, I'm a Democrat.
But around the time, coincidentally, when I became a politically conscious Democrat, the parties just switched.
So even though the Republican Party was founded against slavery, and the Republican Party was founded to protect American workers and against monopoly, against the monopoly of slave owners and against the monopoly of industry, and even though the Republican Party...
He was the persistent advocate of civil rights for everybody, including black Americans, even though the Republican Party authored many, many civil rights bills, and even though the most famous civil rights bill from the 1960s was only passed because of the support of Republicans, not because of the support of Congressional and Senate Democrats.
Forget all of that.
Forget that.
Then they switched.
So, actually, the Republicans became the Democrats, the Democrats became the Republicans.
Ask yourself if this makes sense.
Do you think the head of the GOP and the Democrats just sat down one day and they said, okay, from now on, you're going to be the other one, and I'm going to be you, and that's going to...
Why are we doing that?
I don't know.
Couldn't possibly tell you.
Doesn't make sense.
Part of the reason they insist on this is because geographic loyalties have changed a little bit.
This began in the 60s and 70s especially when the new left took over the Democratic Party, which used to be more moderate or have more moderates.
So there were people...
Who were Democrats who said, well, I can't get on board with atheism and abortion on demand, so I guess I have to identify with the other party.
I can't get on board with those things.
And so you saw some geographic realignment into more ideological terms.
But the GOP is the GOP. The Democratic Party is the Democratic Party.
They can try to run away from their horrible history as much as they like, but ain't gonna work.
From Logan.
Dear Kofefe Sensei, I'm 20 and a sophomore in college, double major.
I work two jobs and am an ROTC cadet.
Good for you.
Now, a part of me wants to cut back on my obligations and try to have a romantic life.
I've never had a girlfriend or been on a date.
As a person who has become incredibly successful at a young age, how do you prioritize love and building a family with your professional aspirations and obligations?
Best wishes, and again, thank you for all that you do.
Best, Logan.
Sounds like you got a lot going for you, so I don't think it'll be too hard for you to go out on a date, but I would make time to do that.
There was an expression we had in college, which was that you could either, there were three things you could do.
Work, sleep, go out and have a good time.
And you got to pick two.
So sleep is for wimps, Buster.
Go out and have a good time.
I mean, go get a girl.
This is going to be much more important than whether you spend an extra hour on your term paper or something, or you spend an extra hour working at whatever one of your jobs is.
If you don't need the money, then you've got to get some balance in your life.
If you end your life alone and overworked and miserable, then what's it going to say in your tombstone?
Here lies Logan.
He did a really good job.
No, I don't think you want that.
So yeah, go out and do it.
And I wonder if some of the overworking and all of that prioritization comes from maybe an insecurity or a lack of confidence in going out and getting a girl.
Because man, if I were single, you couldn't keep me away from going on dates.
You would have to have the entire army try to hold me back.
It still wouldn't work.
So yeah, I would absolutely go out there and do it.
And if it means working fewer hours, fine.
Just make sure you have enough money to pick up the tab for dinner.
Go do it.
Go get the girl.
Act like a man.
Sounds like you're already kind of a man.
You're working hard.
You're in ROTC. That's great.
But to quote Don Corleone, a man can never be a man if he doesn't spend time with his family.
So go out there, meet a girl, have a nice time, start a family.
From Anonymous, I'm terrible at making decisions in life, and I'm always fearful of making the wrong decision.
Have you ever struggled with anything like this?
And if not, do you have any words of advice on how you approach tough situations to make a decision easier?
Yes, I agonize over decisions.
I tear my hair out.
I can't so much as buy a new shirt without analyzing and examining every single angle of it.
And then, eventually, I force myself to make a decision and then I don't think about it again.
This, I think, is the key.
I don't think you should be reckless or hasty or rush into a decision.
You should really take time to do it and then cut yourself off.
You can't take time forever.
Pick a deadline, make a decision, and then don't regret it.
Just move on.
You have other decisions to make.
Sometimes a wrong decision is better than indecision.
You can do both things.
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Take time, examine it carefully, and then do it and move on.
How do you do that?
For me, I have great faith in providence.
Providence, the idea that the world makes sense, or for you more religiously minded people, the more precise way of saying that is that...
God is God.
You know, all nature is but art unknown to thee, all chance direction which thou canst not see.
I think as long as I do my best, God will do the rest, and I'm going to move on.
And if I make a bad decision, I rejoice in my sufferings, and I'll move on then too.
From Valerie, my parents and I are conservative and voted for President Trump, and my boyfriend is liberal and voted for Hillary.
Are you sure he's your boyfriend?
Is he maybe non-binary?
No, I don't.
Non-binary lesbian?
No, I'm kidding.
She goes on.
Both sides feel very strongly about politics, and I feel that I'm stuck in the middle because I love them all the same.
Do you have any words of advice on what I could say to my parents and boyfriend?
So that all sides respect each other and can get along.
Yes, you're in a slightly tough spot because typically in this kind of divided scenario would be the man who's more conservative and the woman who's a little more liberal.
It's just the way it shakes out.
And so it's a little weird when men are liberal.
It's just like it happens.
I have liberal male friends.
It's just like a little more weird.
It might make it a little trickier.
But, you know, I've got a couple of friends married.
The wife is much more conservative and the guy is much more liberal.
But they're incredibly respectful people.
And I think that what is usually the case, and this has been borne out by social science, is that conservatives understand leftism and liberalism much better than liberals and leftists understand conservatism.
It's not because we're so superior.
It's largely because the popular culture is leftist.
So if you're in the culture, you just kind of get it.
And if you have a contrary view, then you're going to understand both of those, whereas the leftists in the culture don't really need to understand conservatism.
What is crucial is for your boyfriend to know, to at least trust that conservatives have a reason for thinking the things they do.
He has to at least trust that there is a good faith, goodwill reason that conservatives exist.
And it's not just that they're evil, vicious, awful, terrible, greedy, mean people.
And But what the conservative side of your family needs to have is patience, you know, and some goodwill and a little bit of humility and say, well, look, there before the grace of God go I. I was a liberal very briefly in my life, so I understand a lot of their arguments too.
If you have that, just that, I guess it's a respect, but it's a...
It's a simple humility to say, gosh, you know, I don't understand everything.
Maybe that conservative gets something that I don't get.
Or even maybe that liberal gets something I don't get.
I think you'll be just fine.
And then eventually he'll change his mind because you're right and he's wrong.
Final question from James.
Mr.
Knowles, have you considered running for political office?
Perhaps the Senate best regards James.
If an opportunity came up and I felt that I could actually do something, I guess I would do it.
If I were just going to run and were just some vacuous guy doing nothing in the federal government, I have absolutely no interest in that whatsoever.
It seems like a waste of time, a waste of money.
It seems to really make life unpleasant.
So if there were an opportunity to actually do something good, I would certainly do it.
I think that's great and I think it's wonderful to go into politics for the right reasons.
But if it's just, you know, getting your name on a billboard, I don't need to do that.
I can do that some other way.
I'll go write another blank book and then I'll get a billboard.
As for running for the Senate, I was not interested in it really until today when AOC basically threatened to abolish it.
So I guess if I'm going to run for Senate, I better do it sooner rather than later, even though I'm actually...
I'm too young to run for either office right now, for the Senate or President, so hopefully AOC doesn't abolish the Senate before I have a chance to go at it.
All right, that's our show.
Come back on Monday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then.
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
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, The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
If you prefer facts over feelings, if you aren't offended by the brutal truth, if you can still laugh at the nuttiness filling our national news cycle, well, tune on in to The Ben Shapiro Show, where you'll get a whole lot of that and much more.
▲
Export Selection