President Trump tweets out a dog meme, and the mainstream media lose their collective minds. We will explain why fanatics never laugh, and how democracy dies in barkness. Then, RealClearInvestigations uncovers the possible identity of the impeachment whistleblower. We will examine who he is and why it matters. Finally, Facebook and Twitter take opposite approaches to political advertising in 2020, and the legacy media-dependent Left is furious. Date: 10-31-2019
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President Trump tweets out a dog meme and the mainstream media lose their collective minds.
We will explain why fanatics never laugh and how democracy dies in barkness.
Then Real Clear Investigations uncovers the possible identity We will examine who he is, and he sure does look an awful lot like Matt Walsh.
Then we will examine why it matters.
Finally, Facebook and Twitter take opposite approaches to political advertising in 2020, and the legacy media-dependent left is furious.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
A side note before we begin, I have to thank the Washington Post for giving me my second dog pun title of the week.
I really couldn't have done it without you guys.
Obviously, we had zero bark 30 earlier in the week, and now, because of the Washington Post's absurd reaction to a dog meme tweeted out by the president, we now have today's Democracy Dies in Barkness.
So, thank you again.
This is media.
This is journalism.
That's the Washington Post.
President Trump tweeted out a meme.
We're very proud of this meme here at the Daily Wire because it was our meme.
It was a meme of...
President Trump was putting a medal on to somebody, obviously.
It was a Medal of Honor recipient.
And we subbed out the guy and put in a picture of that dog who killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and tweeted it out.
So then Trump took it and he just put the words, American Hero, all in caps.
This is very funny, right?
This is not...
Of all the intense, fury-inducing things that happen in politics today, just a nice little moment of levity to celebrate this dog that people like, and through that to celebrate the killing of the head of ISIS. We'll just leave it at that, okay?
No, of course we can't leave it at that, because the mainstream media have lost their minds.
This was the response from Steve Herman.
Steve Herman from Voice of America.
It's a left-wing outlet.
He was determined to get to the bottom of this picture because something just didn't look right to him.
He tweeted out, I've requested details from the White House on this photo.
There was no such canine event on today's president's schedule, but there is a Medal of Honor ceremony set here for later today for an active duty Green Beret.
You're going to get to the bottom of it, Steve.
You're going to find out, hold on, something about, you know that picture of the smiling dog with his tongue out, having a medal put on him by the president?
A medal, which by the way, has a little paw on the ribbon, just a little bronzed paw.
Maybe that's not a real photo.
Maybe that was photoshopped or something.
Let's, let's see.
The New York Times investigates it too.
New York Times headline quote, Trump tweets faked photo of hero dog getting a medal.
It's not a real photo.
He didn't even hold a ceremony where he gave a dog the Medal of Honor.
It was fake.
Fake news.
You see in the original photo, President Trump is seen giving the Medal of Honor to James C. McLaughlin.
I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it, but this guy's like an actual American hero.
He's a great guy.
Won the Medal of Honor.
So...
The New York Times reports, The paper reports, We're good to
example of an American man.
Do you think dog memes are funny?
Yes, New York Times, I think dog memes are funny.
Okay, thank you very much.
We've got to get this out.
Stop the presses!
The Medal of Honor recipient believes that dog memes are funny.
Then, for the absolute best one, wasn't Voice of America, wasn't the New York Times, it was the Washington Post.
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
McLaughlin, 73, could not be reached for comment.
Jeremy Boring, the chief operating officer at the Daily Wire, dismissed emailed questions about whether the altered photo originated from his publication.
By the altered photo, they mean the meme.
And by the meme, we're referring to that image that the president tweeted out, which had our watermark on it.
It's not like hiding the question of whether we made the meme.
We're very proud of the meme.
We're very happy that the president also has a sense of humor.
It says at the bottom, at Real Daily Wire.
It's us.
You got us.
But even the way that WAPO describes it is not true.
Jeremy did not dismiss questions about whether or not we made the meme.
And I know this because I saw the email interaction.
Jeremy showed it to me.
Here's the interaction.
Alex Horton from the Washington Post emails Jeremy Boring, COO of the Daily Wire.
Hello, I'm with the Washington Post and wanted to get confirmation this photo originated with you and if it did, that you digitally removed Medal of Honor recipient James McLaughlin and replaced him with a dog.
Then Jeremy responded to the Washington Post.
Alex, on the record, you've got to be effing joking.
He spells it out.
I can't because this is a family show.
You've got to be effing joking.
Please quote me on that.
Thanks, Jeremy.
Jeremy Boring, COO at Daily Wire.
The easiest way to tell a fanatic is that they lack a sense of humor.
That's why this matters.
The easiest way.
Look, this was a fun moment.
Daily Wire tweeted out this meme.
It's a pretty funny meme.
The president laughed at it.
He tweeted it out too.
All the rancor in Washington.
Maybe we could all just come together and have a little laugh.
The internet was made for dog memes.
I guess maybe the Washington Post, they're sort of cat people, perhaps.
But the internet was made for memes of silly-looking animals.
We can all come together, and beyond that, we can enjoy this critical defeat of ISIS. That would be nice, right?
The left can't do that.
And the left is...
It's no longer that leftist politicians are leading the media.
Now, in many ways, the media are leading the leftist politicians, but all of them taken together.
The way you can tell they're fanatics, the way you can tell they've lost the narrative, is that they've lost their sense of humor.
The left has become so fanatical in its hatred of conservatives that they can't even laugh at a dog meme.
In order to laugh, you need to have a sense of humor.
In order to have a sense of humor, you need to have a sense of proportion.
You need to have a sense of balance.
You know, we could talk for hours about what makes something funny, and there is nothing, I assure you, there's nothing more hilarious than listening to somebody explain a joke.
But part of humor is incongruity.
You see a really, really tall, thin guy next to a really, really short, fat guy.
Just that image alone is very funny.
Why is it funny?
Because of the incongruity.
How do you perceive incongruity?
If you have a sense of proportion.
You recognize that those two proportions are way out of the norm.
And so that gets you to laugh.
Frankly, the president tweeting out a dog meme and the left losing its collective mind is very funny.
It's funny to us.
The left is being funny, they just don't know they're being funny.
Fanatics are not able to do that.
This is a problem not just about one dog meme.
It represents the left's biggest challenge here.
It represents, I think, why they're a little bit in trouble for 2020.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So the left has lost its sense of humor because the left has lost its sense of proportion.
This is true not just in the press, not just in the mainstream media.
It's true also in our government.
We've got some new information out about the so-called whistleblower, about the latest attempt to overturn the 2016 presidential election and impeach President Trump.
Real clear investigations believes it has identified the whistleblower.
This is a great contrast.
You have Washington Post, Democracy Dies in Barkness, talking about how they've got to get to the bottom of who made a dog meme.
And then you've got Real Clear Investigations, which actually is going to show us something about this whistleblower.
They believe that the whistleblower is Matt Walsh.
No, I'm joking.
It's not Matt Walsh, but the guy who they think it is looks a lot like Matt Walsh.
I knew Walsh was a little lukewarm on the president.
Didn't know he would overturn the election.
This is what Real Clear Investigations believes.
They believe it's a 33-year-old named Charamella, Eric Charamella.
He's a registered Democrat holdover from the Obama White House.
He worked before that with Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan.
Vocal critic of Donald Trump, he helped initiate the Russia collusion investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
Jaramela left the NSC. He was on the National Security Council.
He left that in mid-2017.
Why did he leave?
Because there were concerns that he was leaking to the media.
That would appear to be justified now.
He then returned.
After he leaves the White House, he returns to the CIA in Langley, Virginia.
He's accused of working against Trump and of leaking against Trump.
So this is according to officials on the NSC who were speaking on the condition of anonymity while discussing intelligence matters.
What else do we know about this guy?
This guy actually was at Yale right around the same time I was.
He graduated in 2008.
I got there in 2008.
That tells me a lot about this guy.
Because I knew a whole lot of activist Democrats who thought that they were kings of the world, who went and immediately started working in the swamp after college.
And it shows you the real stakes of this impeachment.
Nobody elected Eric Charmella to be president.
Nobody elected this 33-year-old guy who's worked in the bureaucracy and the intelligence community.
People did elect Donald Trump.
But this guy, reportedly, allegedly Eric Charmella, but whoever the whistleblower is, this guy believes that he knows better than the American people.
This guy believes that he has the right to elect whatever president he wants.
330 million Americans be damned.
Charimella, while he is out there going out to try to uncover this Ukrainian collusion story, right before he goes and files the complaint, he seeks guidance, guidance, quote-unquote, from Adam Schiff.
Why Adam Schiff?
Why does he have this cozy relationship with Democrats?
Charmella worked with the DNC. He worked with the DNC operative who dug up dirt on Trump during the 2016 election.
He actually invited her to the White House for meetings.
That's according to former White House colleagues.
This operative, Alexandra Chalupa, is a Ukrainian-American who tried to help Hillary Clinton.
They led an effort to link the Republican campaign, the Trump campaign, to the Russian government.
Another former co-worker says he knows her.
He had her in the White House.
This is what we're about to see.
So what we're seeing right now is the impeachment, the Ukrainian, the phone call.
We don't really know what that's about.
I have said for a long time impeachment is a defensive measure.
To exonerate Democrats early or to mitigate the disaster of the upcoming investigations from the DOJ and from John Durham.
The investigations into what they did in the 2016 election.
They're not giving up on this.
They will not give up.
They won't admit that they lost.
Bill Clinton on TV admitted that Hillary Clinton might run for president again.
She may or may not ever run for anything, but I can't legally run for president again.
So, Bill Clinton.
Listen, the trouble with believing Bill Clinton, of course, is he's occasionally been dishonest on national television before.
Now, listen, I'm telling you the truth here.
I did not have...
You know how it finishes.
But he did have relations with those women, and I don't think Hillary Clinton's going to run again, but he's leaving the door open.
He's leaving the door open, as did her senior advisor, Philip Raines, as did her campaign staff when they were talking to the New York Times.
Even now, after all of these years, Hillary's not willing to give up on the 2016 election.
Neither was this whistleblower.
Neither are the people who insist that they know better than the American people.
All a cause for concern.
Because I think the way the mainstream media portray this...
You have President Trump, this rogue, this monster, this guy who's going to institute World War III, and he's being held back and reined in by the good, glorious, hard-working men and women of the intelligence community, the CIA, or the bureaucracy, or the State Department.
Thank goodness for those guys, right?
No.
If RealClear Investigations is right, then the American people who elected President Trump Are being told to sit down and shut up by some 33-year-old schmuck from Yale who thinks he knows better than not just the American people but the founding fathers and the great institutions of our country which have set up a method for electing the president.
Apparently this guy was involved in the first attempt to take Trump out because he knows better.
These masters of the universe in Washington, D.C., Hillary Clinton, all these years later, still considering running, still going out there.
You know, this takes us into other 2020 news because we got bad news for Joe Biden.
His polls are still falling.
Democrats are still a little bit weak.
Actually, there was that one poll out of the...
Boston Herald for New Hampshire, it showed that you've got basically Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg, or Bernie Sanders, rather, all tied in New Hampshire.
But if Michelle Obama gets into the race, all of a sudden, she's got 26%.
Liz Warren has 20.
Biden and Bernie have 15%.
Race totally changes.
They want Michelle Obama, except they don't really, because everyone likes these candidates who are not in the race.
In theory, the minute they get in, their poll numbers drop.
Just to remind you of this, Michelle Obama was going out, she was answering a question at a Q&A, and she reminded us why she was so unlikable in the White House in the first place.
Are you printed in material?
Can you really make the grade?
Can you cut it?
What do you do in those instances?
All you can do is put your head down and do the work and let the work your truth speak for yourself.
I can't make people not afraid of black people.
I don't know what's going on.
I can't explain what's happening in your head.
But maybe if I show up every day as a human, a good human, doing wonderful things, loving my family, loving your kids, taking care of things that I care about, maybe, just maybe, that work will pick away at the scabs of your discrimination.
Maybe that slowly will unravel it.
That's all we have.
Because we can't do it for them because they're broken.
Their brokenness in how they see us is a reflection of their brokenness.
And you can't fix that.
All you can do is the work.
This is why Michelle Obama is a bad presidential candidate.
This is why these polls saying that she's going to get the nomination if she jumps in are just not true.
people, people don't really remember this, but she has the same problem as Hillary Clinton, which is she's bitter.
She doesn't like her fellow Americans.
I mean, listen to this.
This is the woman, the first black first lady of the United States, wife to the first black president of the United States, elected not just once, but twice.
All these years later, talking about how Americans hate black people, how people just hate black people and she doesn't get what she deserves and she's better than them and they're broken, but she's not broken.
Look, everybody's got original sin, but not Michelle Obama.
No, she is pure as the driven snow.
Michelle Obama, so much better than all of us.
And how awful these Americans are to, to what?
To elect her husband twice?
Same thing, you know, in, in 2008, when her husband got elected, she very famously went on, on TV and said that the election of her husband was the first time in her life that she was proud of her country.
Let me tell you something.
For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country.
And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.
It's that bitterness.
It's that entitlement.
It's that total lack of gratitude.
It's that total lack of proportion.
Same thing with Hillary.
Hillary's had a lovely career.
The American people have been very good to the Clintons.
And it's the same thing.
You owe me this.
I deserve to be president.
I'm so angry.
Michelle Obama, her husband gets elected president.
She doesn't say, wow, what a great country this is.
Gosh, you know, maybe I was wrong about not being proud of this country for my entire life.
Because, you know, they just elected my husband.
What a great country.
And my big knock on the country is that it's hopelessly bigoted.
But then obviously it's not because we just elected a black guy president.
No, she doesn't say that.
The left can't change the narrative when new facts emerge.
The left, when circumstances change that should delight them, that give delight, that give surprise, that give a little bit of wonder, they can't accept that.
They can't have a good laugh and say, gosh, how lovely is that?
So Michelle Obama says, this is the first time in my life that I'm proud of my country.
Doesn't, not, doesn't even look happy when she says it.
Same thing, they elect her husband, they elect her husband a second time.
America's been very good to her.
Gave her a best-selling book.
She says, look, this country hates black people.
People in this country, so many people hate black people and I didn't get what I deserved and people were hard on me and my life is so terrible, but the woman went to Princeton.
Then she married this politician who goes on to become president.
Then she gets a best-selling book.
Michelle Obama is one of the 0.00000000001% of luckiest, most privileged people in the history of the world.
And still she complains.
Same with Hillary Clinton.
Same exact thing.
They can't change the narrative.
Doesn't matter.
They could elect Michelle Obama president.
They could elect Hillary Clinton president.
They'd still be bitter.
It's that fanatic attitude.
Now, on the 2020 front, by the way, regardless of whether those two get into the race, there is some breaking news out of Twitter, a major move which shows that Twitter is going to ban all political advertising in 2020.
And this is significant because it's the opposite approach that Facebook is taking.
Facebook is going to allow virtually all political advertising.
Now, what the left wants to do is they want there to be political advertising, but they only want it to advertise for left-wing candidates.
So AOC, just last week, was begging Mark Zuckerberg, sort of browbeating him, saying, why on earth are you going to elect conservatives?
Post advertising on Facebook.
And the way AOC couched this was she said, those conservatives are lying about us.
You can't allow lies in political advertising.
You need to fact check the conservatives.
And by the way, you can only partner up with left-wing fact checkers.
But you can't partner up with organizations like The Daily Caller.
I mean, she was, AOC during this, in the same exact breath was saying, you need to fact check conservatives and all the fact checkers have to be liberals.
What they want is only political advertising for me, but not for thee.
Twitter is taking this opposite approach and they're saying no political advertising at all.
It doesn't matter as much for Twitter because their advertising tools aren't that good and political ads make up only a small portion of their revenue.
But I think Facebook has the better policy here.
I think we would be a better country if we adopted the Facebook policy, which is say whatever you want.
Make your argument.
Have speech.
Let's not forget, in a self-governing republic, speech is politics.
Politics is speech.
Go for it.
It's yours.
And if you make a bad argument, if you tell a lie, you're going to be called out for it.
What all of this shows is that the left does not feel confident heading into this election cycle.
Hillary Clinton does not believe that any of the candidates out there are going to beat Trump.
She thinks she's a better candidate than those candidates out there.
The Democratic primary voters, at least in New Hampshire, don't believe that any of those candidates out there are going to beat Trump.
That's why they're asking Michelle Obama to jump into the race.
AOC does not believe that they can win this battle on the merits.
That's why she's trying to get conservatives kicked off of Facebook.
Twitter knows that the left is going to be out of their mind anytime they let a conservative advertise anywhere, anytime they let Trump advertise anywhere.
So Twitter is just throwing up their hands.
Jack Dorsey is saying, please leave me out of this entirely.
Trump dominated social media in 2016.
Conservatives are much better at social media than the left.
This is not just some empty boast.
This is true across organic social media and paid social media.
Trump was the only one taking YouTube and Facebook seriously.
It wasn't Russians.
It wasn't Macedonian click farms.
It was actual strategies from the two campaigns.
Trump beat Hillary on social media.
That's all it is.
Why is...
The right so much better at social media and new media than the left because the left relies on the legacy old media.
The left has for decades.
The old media has been the great protector and gatekeeper for the left and they've kicked out right-wingers and they've framed the narrative so in opposition to right-wingers.
So the left has gotten lazy and complacent with the legacy media.
Now the legacy media are being virtually totally rejected.
We just realized we're shutting out the mainstream media because the mainstream media have no credibility.
You know, the lack of credibility from the mainstream media allowed the growth of social.
Then the growth of social pretty much put the nail in the coffin of the mainstream media because we were able to get some true information finally, for once.
A mainstream media that takes dog memes seriously is not a mainstream media that can command our respect.
And so you're seeing all of these angles intersect.
Trump tweets a dog meme, which triggers the mainstream media, which makes us all laugh at the mainstream media more reliant on the new media, which terrifies the left and the Democrats who call for censorship on the new media.
This is going to get a lot worse.
before it gets better.
This is going to get a lot more intense before it gets any lighter.
And so much of the 2020 election is going to hinge around that question of the relationship between the new media and the old media, of whether the new media are going to kick out the right just like the old media did.
As long as you're hearing talk of candidate Michelle, candidate Hillary, you know that the Democrat, frankly, as long as you're hearing talk of impeachment and whistleblowers and trying to overturn the 2016 election, even as we're heading into the 2020 election, what that tells you is the left does not feel confident.
And they shouldn't feel confident because they have lost the narrative.
They have lost their sense of humor.
They have lost their sense of proportion.
And people out here living in reality are going to have a good laugh at them.
And they're going to go with the guys who are basing their campaigns in the truth, in reality, in what we can see with our own eyes.
They're going to vote for the guys who show the American people a little bit of respect and don't keep throwing their finger up at them.
Don't keep trying to overturn their elections.
Don't turn around to them and say, F you, F this, I've got the microphone.
And on that point, I was at Politicon over the last weekend.
And if you didn't catch the debate, I strongly encourage that you do because it was extraordinarily fun for me to be up there.
And it shows you how desperate the left is to maintain their monopoly on information.
I'm not talking about Chris Hahn.
Who I was debating.
Chris Hunt is the Fox News Democrat who theoretically was my sparring partner here.
Chris was fine.
We had a nice exchange.
The actual sparring partner in the debate was Clay Aiken, who was supposed to be the moderator.
And Clay, he's like a stand-in for the mainstream media because he is obviously a very left-wing Democrat.
He ran for office as a Democrat, but he comes out there and pretends to be objective and within a few moments just completely loses his mind, starts swearing at people.
We actually summed it up.
If you haven't caught the debate, We summed it up in a very short episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which we're calling Clay Aiken Controls the Debate.
I'm asking the questions, so hold on a second.
Hold on a second.
I'm asking the questions.
Feel free to try to control it, but you won't get to.
I want to know what can be done.
I'm not one of them.
I'm asking you, what can be done about climate change?
I'm pretty ignorant about the whole argument myself, I'll admit.
I'm asking you, what should we do?
Unless you want to cede the ground to Democrats to be the ones who come up with ideas, are people who are marching and shouting, Jews will not replace us, are they good people?
It's a yes or no question.
Yes or no.
No, it's a yes or no question.
What a ridiculous question.
Are people who are marching shouting, Jews will not replace us?
Nazis are bad.
Can you say yes or no to this?
Are you capable of that?
I don't need to answer a question because I'm not on the stage.
No, I did not ask you if Nazis were bad.
And I understand those are big words.
People who are Nazis are bad people, Clay.
That's not what I asked you.
I've answered this five times.
No, you haven't.
You're rewording it.
You're rewording it.
I feel so bad for you.
I feel so badly for you.
Why do you feel badly for me?
It's very easy to play a victim.
Hello?
You can boo all you want to.
I don't give a half a f***ing s***.
I asked a yes or no question.
Does President Trump lie?
Yes or no?
Before you start, since clearly the audience thinks I'm biased, we're going to let them ask some questions too.
Well, I may be a hack, but I've got f***ing microphone.
That's what the left is doing to us.
That's what the mainstream media are doing to us right now.
I don't think that's a position of strength.
I think that is great news for us, and we can smile and have a good laugh and have a sense of humor.
And we're not just laughing at dog memes, folks.
We're laughing at Clay Aiken.
We're laughing at that whole mainstream media apparatus.
We've got to get to the mailbag.
We'll get to that in a second.
But first, I'm going to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Head on over to dailywire.com.
$10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
You get the Matt Walsh show.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
That's coming right up.
You get Another Kingdom, the last season, the best season.
So go check that out.
And you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Very, very important.
As the New York Times and the Washington Post do their hard investigative work to figure out the origin of dog memes, you and I can sit there and lap up those salty tears.
It's dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
All right, we're back.
Let's get through as much of the mailbag as we possibly can from Heather.
How do we reconcile our moral obligation as Christians to care for the widow, the orphans, the poor, with the desire to not have our tax dollars funding inadequate and abused social programs?
Thanks.
The way that we do that is that we care for the widow and the orphans and the poor.
We don't just give our money to the government.
What the left has done, pretty effectively actually, is convinced you that giving your money to the government is the same thing as caring for the widow, the orphans, and the poor.
But it's not.
It's extraordinarily inefficient.
Most of that money, much if not most of that money, is just eaten up by the Washington bureaucracy.
Some of it will go toward programs that will then be directed toward the poor that very often harm the very people that they were intended to help.
This is the premise of the Moynihan Report.
This is what turned so many liberals into conservatives in the late 20th century as they realized that those federal welfare programs actually ended up harming the people they were intended to help.
Charity and taxation are very different things.
Because there's also a moral interaction here.
I think Dinesh D'Souza summed this up.
He said, if I'm walking down the street and I see a bum lying on the street, I'm eating a sandwich, and he says, hey, can I have that sandwich?
I'm hungry.
If I give him that sandwich, there's a moral interaction here.
He's asking for some help.
He's asking for charity.
I give him that charity.
He is grateful for that charity.
I have engaged in an act of charity.
That's a moral exchange.
If, however, I'm walking down the street with my sandwich and the bum says, hey, gimme, gimme, and then Barack Obama rides up on a white horse with a pistol pointed at my head and he says, give him the sandwich.
That is not a moral exchange at all.
I resent the beggar and Barack Obama for stealing my food.
The beggar feels entitled to my food.
He doesn't feel gratitude.
He feels entitled to it because Obama said it's his right.
And Obama has done nothing other than threaten me with a gun.
That's not a moral exchange at all, but that's what taxation looks like.
So engage in charity and try to get the government's hands out of your pockets.
From Evan, Dear Skinny Boy, is it alright for parents to enforce a candy tax upon their young children who go trick-or-treating?
I think this act will help create children who believe that taxation is theft.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
I think that's a really good way to get your children to hate you.
I don't know if it's a great way to teach them about taxation.
Let the kids have Halloween.
This used to always bug me when I was a kid.
When I would go out, I'd go trick-or-treating, and then some house would give us an apple.
I don't want an apple.
Halloween is not for apples.
Halloween is for candy.
Halloween is so that little kids can glut themselves on candy Because it's a day of a little bit of mischief and we live in a very rich country and candy is delicious and kids like candy.
No raisins, no apples, no lessons.
This is the other one.
You'd go out trick-or-treating.
And for some of my friends, their parents would take their candy and inspect it for razor blades because some suburban mother saw some news report from some fake journalist that there was this epidemic of weirdos putting razor blades in a kid's candy.
That doesn't happen.
How many times has that happened in history?
Like three times?
Don't do that.
The kids get Halloween.
They should be able to go out trick-or-treating.
They should get a lot of candy.
They don't need to learn lessons about taxation.
The way to teach your kids to be good American citizens is to raise them well and To respect you.
To like you.
To take your ideas seriously.
And I promise you, if you take their candy away from them, they will not respect you.
They will not like you.
I fear they will become huge reactionary liberals.
From Al.
If the UN and NATO and the G7 don't work, how can freedom-minded countries get together?
Or is that a thing of the past?
Thanks.
Get together for what?
What are we going to get together for?
Are we just going to go out and play golf?
This is the question.
When we talk about NATO, for instance, what is the purpose of NATO? NATO was formed in the mid-20th century to protect Western European countries and American allies broadly who support freedom and oppose communism, to protect them from the Soviet Union.
NATO is an institution built for the Cold War.
The Cold War is over.
The Cold War has been over since 1990.
So now what?
What are we doing?
I'm not saying we need to disband NATO tomorrow, but we need to at least know what the purpose of it is.
What's the purpose of the UN? Is that to protect freedom-loving countries?
No, the vast majority of member states of the UN are the worst people on earth.
The UN lets all sorts of terrible people in.
There's no such thing as the United Nations, though.
What is the United Nations?
We all come together, paid for by the United States, on really nice real estate in Manhattan, and then all the worst people on earth lecture America on how terrible we are, and we pay for that, too, and then we send them home.
That doesn't accomplish anything.
To quote John Bolton, there is no such thing as the United Nations.
It doesn't matter.
We could build the building 20 stories taller.
There still would be no such thing as the United Nations.
There is the international community.
There are the nations of the world.
And there is the national interest of the United States.
When those things intersect, I am more than happy to work with every nation on Earth.
But When those don't intersect, then what are we doing?
Charles de Gaulle said that nations don't have friends, they have interests.
This seems cold-blooded to some people, but it's not.
It's just true.
Nations are not exactly like people.
We have relationships, we have alliances, but nations have interests over time.
Same thing.
What is the G7? What is the point of the G7? What we should do is support our allies and And pursue our interests and be smart about it and not imprison ourselves into a foreign policy that made sense 100 years ago but doesn't make sense today.
That's the purpose.
I mean, the purpose of all of these institutions is to advance national interests.
If there's no national interest to advance, I don't think we need to pay a whole lot of attention to those organizations.
From Anonymous...
I go to law school at Georgetown University Law Center.
Now I see why you wanted to remain anonymous.
You can't out yourself for listening to this show or to anything to the right of Hillary Clinton.
I go to law school at Georgetown University Law Center and just received an email telling me that I will be paying a reparations fee next fall to establish a fund to support our descendants.
I knew nothing of this before coming there.
How is this reconcilable with Title IX? What action would you recommend?
Thanks.
That is really bizarre.
I had not heard anything about that, but I'm not surprised that universities would put in a reparations fee or any other manner of social justice tax applied unfairly to benefit certain students.
If I were you, I would not pay it.
And if they yell at you about it, which I don't think they will do, I think they'll just let it go.
If they go after you for it, I would just tell them very politely that you're here to be educated and you're here to learn about the law and you're not here to engage in any sort of social justice left-wing activism.
And if they kick you out for that, well, I don't know, go to Antonin Scalia School of Law or something like that.
This is especially important for law school because As a lawyer, your integrity is so essential to the job.
Who you are, the decisions you make in your life is so essential.
It's a little different than a kid who's just trying to squeeze through an undergraduate class so he keeps his head down a little bit.
If you're a lawyer, then you are participating in the legal community.
You might run for office.
You are presenting yourself as, in your work life, Relying upon your integrity.
So I would not compromise that in law school.
Because if you compromise in law school, you're going to compromise the rest of your career.
There are plenty of lawyers who compromise their integrity, but you don't want to be one of them.
From Dylan.
Dear charismatic conqueror, I watched your double debate at Politicon in which you debated the liberal Chris Hahn and the moderator whose identity is irrelevant.
I was wondering how you were able to stay composed, be charming and charismatic while also staying on topic.
Go on.
Stop it.
What do you really think?
Thank you for the question and the compliment.
I did get a few versions of this question over the past week, most of which just said, when you've got these two liberals screaming in your face, how can you not get angry?
Why would I get angry?
People get angry when they know they're losing the argument.
I mean, there is a place for righteous anger.
If someone goes up and calls your wife fat and calls your son stupid, then I guess you can punch him in the face.
But most of the time, if you're having a political debate, if you're having a debate about something objective, you know, outside of yourself, something that isn't really personal, if you have a good argument, if you're confident in your argument, then you don't need to yell and name-call and become all sort of angry.
The left has lost the sense of this.
One, because they've lost the argument, and two, because of a change that happened in the 1960s.
In the 1960s, the left decided that the personal is the political.
This became a major slogan of the feminist movement, and it was adopted by other left-wingers as well.
What that means is that we need to eradicate the traditional difference in our republic between the public and the private.
But free government, self-government, relies upon this distinction between the public and the private.
Meaning, I've got my family life, I have my personal endeavors, and then I put on my suit and I finish up my tie, and I go out and I do the business of the people.
And those are different things.
And so, while you might have some personal animosity towards somebody, you let that go in public.
Or, vice versa, if you have a public relationship with somebody, you have a different relationship in private.
That vanished with the left.
The left made the personal, the political, to the great detriment of self-government.
I don't take these things personally.
I've worked as an actor.
I've worked in politics.
It's a blood sport.
So you just take the hits and you move on.
If you're taking these things personally, if you're really getting heated...
Maybe it's because you don't quite understand what you're saying and you don't quite understand what the other guys say.
From Jasmine.
Recently you said rap was the devil's music.
I couldn't quite tell if that was in jest or a true opinion of yours.
Much of the rap genre is excreble, but there is a lot of good Christian rap.
Many of the artists in the clip you played were Christian rappers.
Was that intentional or not?
Thanks.
I don't remember the clip.
I'm not sure I even pulled it myself.
Rap is terrible.
It's just awful.
And it almost certainly is the devil's music.
But God makes a habit of confounding the devil's plans as he did in Kanye West's recent album, which is very, very good.
I have almost never found a rap song that I liked.
There have been a couple, I guess.
I've...
I will say I've found more rap songs that I like than contemporary Christian songs that I like.
I consider those contemporary Christian songs to just be absolutely awful, saccharine, twaddle, ridiculous, insipid, terrible, terrible music.
Which is why I was so surprised by Kanye's album, because I felt Kanye's album actually took religion seriously.
It took the human condition seriously, more seriously than most.
If you like these modern songs, though, I hope you're not offended.
I don't like most popular music.
It's just really decayed.
It's really awful.
This is actually kind of my feeling about liturgy.
My feeling about church services.
My feeling about the mass.
I don't like the modern ones with the acoustic guitars and the sappy 70s hymns that weren't even cool 40 years ago.
Because they're not beautiful.
They're not that beautiful, at least.
Classical Liturgy, traditional worship services are much more beautiful.
The typical response to this is, oh Michael, you old fuddy-duddy, come on.
The people are listening to the popular music.
Yeah, I know that.
I know that more people listen to Miley Cyrus than listen to Bach, for instance.
Bach is more beautiful than Miley Cyrus.
And therefore, When I'm engaging in worship, when I'm in a liturgy or I'm in the Mass, I want the beautiful thing.
I want the beautiful thing in all facets of life.
That does require a little bit of cultivation and understanding.
It's much harder to understand what Bach is doing than what Miley Cyrus is doing.
But that's some of the work that we have to do in the culture.
And so when we win the culture, it doesn't just mean that we need to have the best memes, that we need to have the funniest jokes.
I mean, that's important too.
It also means that we need to work on elevating the culture from this degraded level of pop and kitsch.
We need to work on elevating that and elevating our understanding.
It will make us all chill out a lot more.
It will reduce anxiety, reduce stress, reduce people screaming at you in political debates.
It will make you understand much better what everybody is saying.
And it will make you feel at least a touch of that awe and wonder for that which is beautiful.
Because that which is beautiful is connected to that which is good and that which is true.
That's how you win the culture.
You also win the culture with funny dog memes.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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