Pop culture affects politics, but politics affects culture too. As a banana duct taped to a wall sells for $120K at Art Basel, as Drag Queen Story hour hits preschools, and as kids get hooked on hardcore Internet porn before the age of 10, libertarians beware: we examine whether politics can help fix our screwed up culture. Can't get enough of The Michael Knowles Show? Enjoy ad-free shows, live discussions, and more by becoming an ALL ACCESS member TODAY at: https://dailywire.com/Knowles
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The great Andrew Breitbart told us that politics is downstream of culture.
And of course, he was right, in a sense.
Pop culture has dictated plenty of political transformations over the years, from public opinions on socialism to redefining marriage.
But politics affects culture, too.
As a banana duct taped to a wall sells for $120,000 at Art Basel, as drag queen story hour hits preschools, and as kids get hooked on hardcore internet porn before the age of 10, libertarians beware!
We examine whether politics can help fix our screwed-up culture, too.
Then, speaking of bad politics and creepy sex, disgraced former Congressman Katie Hill publishes an op-ed in the shameless New York Times, which we will analyze as the dumbest article on the internet today.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
All right.
We've been waiting for our new set for about 55 years now, I think.
We are on it.
Very exciting.
That's the good news here.
There's a lot of good news in Washington at the White House.
Bad news on the Capitol for Democrats.
And all of this actually tells us a little bit about our culture.
The impeachment hearings, the way that's going, actually does relate to $120,000 bananas and Drag Queen Story Hour and internet porn.
We We'll figure out how in a second.
First, we just have to mention the really great news for the White House because obviously no one else is going to do that at CNN or MSNBC or increasingly even on ostensibly right-wing sources.
So, last week's impeachment hearings.
Train wreck, right?
Don't believe the spin from the Washington Post or anybody else.
An absolute disaster for Democrats.
The impeachment inquiry hearings didn't come up with any evidence that Trump committed wrongdoing.
Then you had those three awful professors.
one was less likable than the next.
And the only one who had any sense was Jonathan Turley, who's actually a liberal law professor, though he was called by the Republicans.
And he pointed out in a really calm, erudite, ironclad way that the Democrats don't have nothing on President Trump.
You don't need to take my word for that.
You don't need to just accept and say, oh, Michael is putting spin on this for the president.
It isn't just me.
Even Jake Tapper, even CNN believes that last week's impeachment hearings were a train wreck.
Tapper is now asking Nancy Pelosi if she's afraid that she ended up helping Trump with the impeachment.
He's asking if she will regret the impeachment process if the impeachment process ends up helping Trump.
It looks right now like it will help Trump.
And what is Nancy Pelosi going to say?
She's not going to say, yeah, you're right, Chuck, we made a huge, or yeah, you're right, whatever his name is, Jake.
We made a huge mistake.
We never should have initiated the impeachment hearings.
No, she's not going to do that.
She's going to double down, but her response is just not believable.
If you wake up the day after Election Day 2020 and exit polls show that impeaching President Trump helped him get re-elected, would you have any regrets?
No, this isn't about politics at all.
This is about patriotism.
It's not about partisanship.
It's about honoring our oath of office.
This is the first president has committed all of these things, as the constitutional experts said yesterday, nobody ever has even come close.
Not Richard Nixon even came close.
To his dishonoring his own oath of office.
So no, this isn't, politics is not even a consideration in this.
This is about protect and defend the Constitution.
You know, it is actually impressive that somebody could tell such an obvious and egregious lie as the impeachment of Donald Trump has nothing to do with politics.
The impeachment that we've been pushing for, for now four different reasons, the first three of which failed and the fourth is probably going to fail too since before he even took office.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with politics.
It is impressive that someone could be in politics so long to become so cynical to be able to tell an Absolutely egregious lie with a straight face.
But you can see, even in the way Pelosi's talking, she stammers a little bit.
She holds up.
She's, even for her, and she's so past shame on this, it's A little difficult to get it out.
She says, well, look, Jake, this has nothing to do with politics.
This is about how he's so much worse than Nixon.
The implicit question here is, how is he worse than Nixon?
What did he do?
She never gives an answer.
In all of the things that he did...
You know, from the first thing to that other, the thing he did after that, and then finally the third thing, that was almost worse than the first two.
Well, how about you name them, Nancy, except you can't, because all of the charges that you've made, treason, bribery, extortion, this, have been completely knocked down.
There's no evidence of it whatsoever.
She might as well go back to Russia collusion.
We had a two and a half year $30 million investigation into that.
Came up with nothing.
But go back.
At least that one has a specific charge.
This, what, bribery?
How is what he did bribery?
They got nothing, right?
So Nancy Pelosi does her best to stammer through this.
Representative Al Green, one of my favorite members of Congress, this Democrat who just, he keeps saying the things that they're not supposed to be saying, like Al Green said at the very beginning of Trump's, I think it was just after he'd been elected, but maybe not even before he was sworn in.
He said, yeah, we got to impeach this guy.
Then slightly after he got sworn in, he says, yeah, we got to impeach him.
Why?
I don't know.
We got to impeach him because if we don't impeach him, he's going to get reelected.
He just keeps being accidentally honest about the Democrats' plans.
Al Green knows that all of the current charges against the president are so vague, so nebulous, they're not real.
So Al Green has a new argument for impeachment.
The new argument is that we have to impeach Trump to deal with slavery.
I know that you introduced one of those first impeachment resolutions against Trump, and let's look at how that went down.
It actually lost 364 to 58.
How do you think this process ends if more evidence is revealed?
And are you concerned at all that Americans are having a waning interest as this process drags on?
Well, it was yesterday, in fact, that we celebrated in a sense that we had something that was brought to the floor.
I do believe, ma'am, that we have to deal with the original sin.
We have to deal with slavery.
Slavery was the thing that put all of what President Trump has done lately into motion.
Until we deal with the issue of invidious discrimination as it relates to LGBTQ community, the anti-Semitism, the racism, the Islamophobia, the transphobia, and also the misogyny that he has exemplified, I don't think our work is done.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, that makes sense.
So they don't have him on Ukraine.
They don't have him on Russia.
They don't have him on taxes.
They don't have him on Stormy Daniels.
So now we need to impeach Trump because of slavery.
What about the other 44 presidents?
Are you going to impeach them over slavery?
No, just Trump.
We need to wait.
We've had slavery in America.
We had slavery beginning in the 17th century, and we had it up until the mid-19th century.
And then we didn't have it anymore after that.
And then we had to wait about 150 years.
And then we needed to impeach the 45th president to deal with slavery.
And that is such a ridiculous statement that I think Al Green heard it in his head.
So then he corrected it even during the statement.
He said, and also racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, phobia, phobia, phobia-ism, phobia-ism.
We need to impeach Trump for phobia-ism.
They can't nail him on any actual impeachable offense.
So it's just all this vague...
Neologisms were new words that have been created for an ideological purpose, all of which amount to orange man bad.
Now, this is at the same time that Trump got some pretty good news on the political front this week, and the good news on the political front is actually affecting the cultural front.
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Drats.
Okay, good news from President Trump here.
From Trump and for Trump.
The good news is this jobs report.
What happened in the November jobs report?
You probably haven't read about it very many places.
266,000 new jobs created.
Unemployment at a 49-year low.
12-month wage growth is at 3.1%.
Very, very strong.
54,000 manufacturing jobs created.
Black and Hispanic unemployment at or near record lows.
You couldn't ask for more good news.
Pretty much every single box you could check, everything is doing great.
This is great news, and it really matters on the cultural front.
If politics were merely downstream of culture, those numbers wouldn't matter.
Because who cares about the political events?
That's not going to shape the future.
The only thing that's going to shape the future is movies, if politics were merely downstream of culture.
But guess what?
Putting food on the table is a cultural issue.
Having a job, when your husband or your father or, you know, when you have a job, Or when someone in your family has a job, that creates dignity.
That makes you feel dignity.
That raises everybody up.
That is a cultural matter.
Those things, those cultural changes in this case, are coming by way of politics.
Just look at the black and Hispanic unemployment numbers, right?
And then look at the black and Hispanic approval ratings of President Trump right now.
There was a major poll that came out last week, that Emerson poll, which showed that black support of President Trump is 34.5%.
Is that poll accurate?
I don't know.
I mean, that's a very high number.
Other polls have backed this up, though.
NPR Marist poll was showing that black and Hispanic support of Trump is pretty high.
Rasmussen poll showed the same thing.
That is strictly political, right?
And yet, if those numbers hold, Democrats are in huge trouble at the national level.
Democrats need to get about 90% of the black vote to maintain their electoral position.
If they lose that, if Republicans get 15% of the black vote, forget about 20%, 25%, 34.5%, it's over for the Democrats.
If the Democrats lose their stranglehold on black voters, that's a big political problem for them, but that's a cultural shift as well, a huge cultural shift.
If you were to crack up this kind of racially homogenous voting among, say, black voters or to a lesser degree Hispanic voters, that is a major cultural shift that speaks very well of our political process.
Some libertarian minded conservatives like to pretend that politics can never have a positive effect on culture, right?
So what they do is they admit that politics affects the culture, but they'll say, oh, it only destroys culture.
Politics can only destroy the culture.
It can never fix the culture.
That's obviously not true.
The Trump administration has had a good effect on culture in many ways.
The Reagan administration had a very good effect on culture in many ways.
A lot of people will tell you from the Reagan era, Reagan defeated the Soviet Union and Amazing.
Reagan fixed the economy.
Amazing.
But one thing they'll tell you, Ronald Reagan made us all feel good about ourselves again.
Made us feel good to be Americans.
That is a cultural fact.
That is a mourning in America, as his ad famously said.
So once you grant that, that politics can have a good effect on the culture.
Once you grant that, Then you've got to ask, what is the role of politics in these social questions?
This has become a big point of contention, specifically in regard to the internet porn debate, which we will get to.
I don't want to start with internet porn.
I want to start with a $120,000 banana.
But before we get to that, I have got to speak about an intersection of politics and culture, too, which is happening in the movie theaters.
And theaters right now, nationwide...
You can go see No Safe Spaces, which if you look at the poster, it says that it's starring Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager.
But we know that that's not true.
We know that it's starring me because I am in the movie for about six seconds.
Adam and Dennis take you on a wild ride in this movie to show you the effects of political correctness, identity politics, and cancel culture.
It takes you through the colleges.
It shows you the impact on...
Obviously college campuses, but also big tech, also in Hollywood.
No Safe Spaces shows us why free speech is so important to a free society.
How it's being threatened, what we can do to fight back.
This is not a typical documentary, okay?
It has animation, it has recreations, it has a lot of Adams, just hilarious, typical humor, which is really, really great.
We had Adam come on the backstage show the other day, and we, you know, it's like we couldn't even get a word out.
We were laughing so much.
No Safe Spaces takes you behind the scenes on Ben Shapiro's riot-filled trip to UC Berkeley.
Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire, has a cameo, and then, of course, you will find me in the film, too.
It's really, really great.
Go check it out.
I think you're absolutely going to love it.
My father saw it this weekend over in Connecticut.
It's all over the country.
It's rated PG-13 in theaters now.
Go to nosafespaces.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, For ticket information and theater locations.
You're really going to love it.
Alright.
I want to talk, before we get to internet porn, I want to talk about a banana duct taped to a wall.
Because it matters.
At Art Basel, this art fair that happens all over the world, this time in Miami, a banana duct taped to a wall sold as an art piece for $120,000.
The Italian artist Maurizio Catalan took a banana, which will rot within a week, duct taped it to a wall, and then sold that art piece, in quotes, for $100.
$20,000.
Now, there were three of these pieces.
The third banana is expected to sell for $150,000.
And then, here's my favorite part of it all.
Right after it sold, a performance artist named David DeTuna ate the banana.
He ate the banana because he was hungry.
So some guy buys this banana duct taped to a wall for $120,000 because he's an idiot.
And then David DeTuna eats his banana.
This shows us a major problem with our culture.
A culture that spends $120,000 on bananas taped to walls.
A culture that considers a banana taped to a wall to be art.
Has lost its sense of the meaning of the word art.
It has lost its sense of beauty.
It has lost its sense of what is good and what is true.
Another one of these.
A portrait.
Apparently hyper-realistic portrait.
I'm not going to subject you to looking at it.
Of Channing Tatum's private area.
Went up on eBay.
It sold for $6,600.
This was done by an LA artist.
Contemporary art.
is terrible.
Generally speaking, with very few exceptions, is terrible.
The paintings, the movies, the plays, the novels, and the buildings.
Now, politics is downstream of culture.
Okay, but can politics play a role here?
Of course it can.
I'm not saying we have to ban bananas taped to walls, though maybe that wouldn't be such a terrible idea, but I don't think we have to do that.
But just think about the role of politics in art.
Think about the buildings.
I was in Grand Central the other day.
I was in New York.
Grand Central, one of the most beautiful buildings in all of New York.
Maybe the most beautiful building in New York.
Grand, huge, gorgeous.
It's made in the Beaux-Arts style.
It's got beautiful, intricate design and ornamentation.
And it's big and it's grand and it's central.
Compare that to the Freedom Tower, the new World Trade Center building.
It's ugly.
It's an ugly building.
It's nothing.
What is it?
It's nothing.
It's a big glass rectangle.
Cool.
Great.
Nothing permanent about it.
Nothing enduring.
Nothing beautiful.
It's just a big box where people can do work.
The city is paying for, certainly for parts, of both of these buildings and for maintenance and for security.
Compare the old Penn Station.
People don't remember this.
The old Penn Station in New York.
One of the most beautiful buildings in New York.
Grand.
Beautiful.
When you walked in there, you felt like you were a king arriving.
Then there's the new Penn Station, which has that monstrosity Madison Square Garden on top of it.
When you walk in there, you feel like you're a rat scurrying around underground just trying to get to where you're going so you can run in your little treadmill for long enough and then go back home and sit in your other tiny little box.
Those buildings are works of art.
Okay, they're funded by the government.
They really affect our lives.
We know that money affects our lives.
Obviously, we can buy things for our friends and family.
Beauty affects our lives, too.
When you're in a beautiful place, you feel better.
You feel more at ease.
You feel more contemplative.
You can raise your head up to higher cultural questions and, ultimately, to higher religious questions.
Imagine if the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. Imagine if that just looked like a regular office building, like a modern late 20th century, just glass and steel and nothing nice about it, no ornamentation, just a box.
That would affect the Supreme Court.
It would affect our government.
There would be no sense of weight, no seriousness, no history, no tradition to that building.
The government has to build public buildings.
It's not a libertarian question of, does the government have to be involved?
There should be no public buildings.
Government should never interfere in any piece of architecture.
It does.
The government does that.
It has a role involved.
To play in the building of public buildings.
Since it does, the question we have to ask is what should conservatives ask from this?
And conservatives should ask the government to make beautiful buildings.
We have a role.
We want beauty.
We know that the government does affect the culture.
We know that the politics does.
Whether you want it to or not, it does.
So we need to make sure that in so much as politics affects the culture, it's got to do it in a good way.
What else do we see a role for when it comes to politics and the culture?
A Florida woman is in a modern relationship.
I'm not saying she's in a same-sex marriage.
No.
She's in a relationship with, I guess it'd be called a quintuple.
She's in a relationship, romantic relationship, with four men.
She's pregnant.
She doesn't know who the father is.
That's modern.
That's love is love.
That's to be celebrated.
We'll get to that in a second first.
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A Florida woman.
Is in a quintuple with four men.
This was just chronicled on a show called Love Don't Judge.
Here she is.
This is Tori.
She fell in love with Travis and Ethan and Mark.
And Chris.
Their four-way relationship is working wonders for them.
A relationship could best be described by having Tori as the hub and all of us are spokes on a giant wheel.
But not everyone understands the dynamic.
I was like, oh, you're kidding, that you're joking.
How will this poly relationship cope with a further addition to the family?
And so who's the father of the baby?
Oh, you think that's weird?
Oh, you think that's maybe not the best thing in the world?
How dare you, you bigot!
How intolerant of you!
How phobic!
And ism!
That is both ism and phobic that you're doing.
Of course not.
Of course not.
This is a cultural issue, right?
This woman is in a romantic relationship that she wants to be recognized culturally, and one presumes politically, with four men simultaneously.
They're having a child together.
They don't know who the father of the baby is.
There is a role for government here.
The government has an interest in protecting children.
The government has an interest in having a definition of marriage.
The government has an interest in this kind of social madness.
How did this come about?
If seven years ago, eight years ago, you had said that this would be chronicled, that this woman would have a relationship with four guys...
I think a lot of people would have said, yeah, maybe there are a lot of weird people, especially, no disrespect intended, but especially in Florida, you see a lot of headlines, right?
Except something fundamentally changed about seven years ago, which is that we redefined marriage for the first time ever.
We fundamentally redefined marriage from a relationship between husbands and wives to anything goes.
We had a definition of marriage that had endured in the West for all of certainly recent memory, but for our civilization, which is that one man marries one woman and they have children together.
Now that has broken down.
We've expanded the definition of marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions.
Why monogamous?
If the whole argument for redefining marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions is love is love and how dare you judge and the heart wants what the heart wants, then who are you to exclude this woman and her four creepy boyfriends from marriage?
Doesn't make any sense.
There will be a political push to legalize polygamy.
There already is in some quarters and there is no limiting principle on the Supreme Court's crazy decision to redefine marriage because Justice Kennedy woke up and felt like a romantic poet one day.
So there will be a major push for this and that is a political issue.
Obviously, marriage or families are cultural primarily, but there is a huge political aspect to this.
There will be an answer.
What is marriage?
There will be a political answer to that.
And if we decide to blow open the doors to marriage, which in many ways we've already done, that is going to have cultural effects.
You know, you say, well, that's crazy.
That's fringe.
That's not going to happen anytime soon.
Look at Drag Queen Story Hour.
Remember Drag Queen Story Hour?
This just burst on the scene like two months ago, and it's this weird thing where at libraries they bring in drag queens to perform sexualized routines for young children.
We said, that's insane.
Some more libertarian-minded defenders of this said, well, who cares?
It's not that many of them.
It's at libraries.
This is a blessing of liberty.
Alright, I guess we need to redefine blessing.
Maybe we need to redefine liberty, or more clearly define it.
But obviously, this libertinism is never content to remain where it is.
It wants to go further.
So in Montreal now, technically not America, but it's America's hat, and what you see there is coming here too.
Drag Queen Story Hour has left the libraries, and it's headed straight to daycare.
This is what one of the organizers of Daycare Drag Queen Story Hour wrote on Twitter.
This guy named Dan Kravitz, quote, I'm proud to have helped organize a drag queen story hour at our local child daycare.
Within these children, we inspire a love of reading while teaching deeper lessons on diversity, self-love, and tolerance of others.
You know, a lot of the recent debate on the right between the libertarians and the more traditionalist types is over whether There's a role for government to say, you know, drag queen story hour for little kids, that's a little bit too far.
Maybe we need some regulations on this.
Maybe we need some laws.
And then the libertarians say, no, any laws regulating any social question is completely unacceptable.
Where the rubber meets the road on this question is internet porn.
My colleague Matt Walsh kicked a beehive the other day when he said he wants to ban internet porn.
Massive debate going on online.
I will give you the correct answer to that debate.
We'll do that in a second.
First, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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Head to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
All right.
This all comes down to internet porn.
It's where it all comes...
Welcome...
They say sex sells, so we're now at the sex portion of the show.
The culture is moving radically left at an increasing rate.
Okay?
That woman with the four dudes, that's going to be a political debate very soon if it isn't already.
Drag Queen Story Hour is certainly a political matter now.
And porn is where a lot of this is being fought.
Frankly, I think it's a cause of a lot of the confusion.
Matt Walsh kicked off this kerfuffle on the internet when he said, we need to ban porn and we should jail pornographers.
This elicited outrage from the more libertarian-minded segments of the right.
There's a writer for the D.C. Examiner, Brad Palumbo.
Palumbo...
He tweeted out, quote, new rule.
All the young tradcon dudes tweeting about how they support porn bans must post their unredacted web browsing history.
Okay, this is the kind of typical response of the more libertarian-minded people, which is, hey, you think that we should regulate something that's bad?
Have you ever done that bad thing?
Well, then you have no standing here because you're a hypocrite.
No.
First of all, first of all, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
But...
Further, beyond seeing in this a kind of contradiction, ha, some guy looked at internet porn like all guys have done in America?
Well, then you can never say that internet porn is bad.
Rather than seeing a contradiction, maybe we should see a cause here, okay?
Amalia Halakias posted on Twitter very accurately, quote, It's obvious the porn is fine, plus you can't stop me, haha, chortle, Twitter shrieking, is not representative of the dominant male view, which is, quote, Yes, I watch porn.
It's gross.
It's bad for me.
I should probably stop.
This seems much clearer to me, you know.
Who knows more about the dangerous effects of crystal meth?
Some guy who's got his life in order, whose job it is to think and write in a nice, air-conditioned, beautiful room on the Potomac?
Or a meth addict?
Probably the meth addict knows what's better.
You know, I notice the people clamoring for, say, the total legalization of drugs like heroin or crystal meth.
They're never the people who are hooked on heroin or crystal meth.
It's always people who have really abstract ideological views of politics, whose lives are basically in order.
That doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me, you know.
Ben Domenech at The Federalist, he tweeted out a similar version.
I think a better objection to the calls to ban porn, but still not sufficient.
He tweeted out, quote, Are the conservatives who think they can ban porn online purposefully ignoring the massive expansion of government this would require, or are they too stupid to realize it?
This is another example where social conservatives should work to reestablish cultural stigmas, which are far more powerful and enduring than government regulation.
So, He's making the argument that politics is simply downstream of culture.
You can't really affect the culture in a good way with the politics.
Do you realize how crazy it would be to jail pornographers?
We could never do that.
Except we do that, and we've done that recently.
Which, perhaps Ben forgot, and I think a lot of conservatives forgot.
We've prosecuted hardcore pornographers as recent as 2008.
We sent them to jail as recently as 2009.
In 2008, in Tampa, Florida, a guy named Paul Little, who goes by the name Max Hardcore, this guy's like out of a movie.
This guy, his name is actually Hardcore, and we're talking about hardcore pornography as the real central problem here.
He was found guilty of distributing obscene material over the internet.
Not kiddie porn, by the way.
Not something that we all consider to be illegal.
He was found guilty of distributing obscene material.
Through the U.S. mail and over the Internet, he was sentenced to 46 months in prison.
Here's a writer in Forbes magazine describing what the usual Max Hardcore scene looks like.
Quote, Hardcore's verbal onslaughts commenced, and the young women were turned into wild-eyed, dazed zombies by the finale.
Okay.
That seems pretty obscene.
That seems pretty bad.
Doesn't seem good.
For the...
It's conservatives or so-called conservatives who are saying, if you're a conservative, we need to support ubiquitous hardcore porn.
And if you think that we shouldn't have ubiquitous hardcore porn, and you think maybe we should use politics to stop it, you're not a real conservative.
I think what that shows is that the meaning of the word conservative has drifted way too far.
When conservatism is boiled down or redefined to just mean libertinism, if not outright anarchy, You've gone too far.
You've redefined conservatism too much.
Why is porn bad?
Why is it bad?
Nobody thinks it's good, okay?
First of all, I don't think I actually need to convince people that widespread hardcore internet porn is bad, okay?
Do you know how I know that internet porn is bad?
And that everyone thinks that internet porn is bad?
Because of the incognito window.
Because there is actually a function now built into every web browser that allows you to hide what you're doing.
When you look at internet porn, do you go and you kind of open up the window shades and you say, oh, hey there, neighbors.
How you doing?
I'm me.
I'm just going to go look at a bunch of really gross internet porn.
You can take a look if you want.
Yeah, I'll just be over here doing that thing that I'm so ashamed to do that I have to turn the lights off, close the door, and, you know, put on earphones and put a towel underneath the door so nobody can hear anything.
Yeah, but it's really good, though.
It's a great thing.
It's totally fine.
A blessing of liberty?
No, I don't think so.
What does porn do?
Internet porn degrades people.
It specifically degrades the women who are in the scenes, right?
It obviously degrades the performers.
It treats human beings who have intellect and will, who are higher than the animals.
It treats them as brutes and it treats them as objects.
It literally objectifies people.
It turns them into nothing more than their flesh, which is crazy to think about.
To think about how much time people spend looking at internet porn when really all you're watching is just pieces of flesh bump into each other.
And we all get titillated about that because we also have a sexual nature.
It degrades the performance.
It also degrades the viewers because you've got to be that guy who goes into the room and turns the lights down and locks the door and closes the blinds and watches that thing and does that thing that doesn't look very dignified or cool.
Yeah.
That's the degradation problem.
It's also ubiquitous.
It's everywhere.
And it's viewed by children.
93% of boys and 62% of girls report seeing porn before age 18.
And I would add to that study, 7% of boys are liars.
So I would guess it's even a little higher than 93%, okay?
The average age of first internet porn exposure today, do you know what the age is?
11.
That's the average age.
10% of kids under the age of 10 have seen porn.
Why else is porn bad?
Highly addictive.
It has long-lasting effects on your brain.
It is leading to skyrocketing rates of erectile dysfunction among young men, men in their 20s who should be active, who should be virile.
They're now suffering from ED like they're Bob Dole in the 90s.
It also has long-lasting effects on your soul.
That's a question for another day.
It's also disgusting.
It's just gross, right?
The porn is gross.
I think the people who watch the porn, which is statistically like every guy in America.
But hopefully there's a movement now to really fight back against this.
So I hope that number is going down.
You know, especially when the internet was first invented, like everybody was doing it.
I think only now are we seeing the dangerous and deleterious effects of it.
The porn itself is disgusting, but the very fact that everybody's looking at internet porn all the time is disgusting in itself because it makes us a nation of wankers.
And you don't want to be a nation of wankers because that's sad and pathetic.
This is a very tough issue.
It's actually a very tough issue.
Not in the clarity of it.
I think we all know it's bad, it's gross, it's new, it's highly addictive.
Our brains were not built to handle this.
And we have a kind of vaguely libertarian politics.
At least, the right has convinced itself to become libertarian in recent decades.
And that's made the problem a lot harder.
Virtually, everybody's looked at the stuff.
It's very addictive.
It would be good to discourage it.
This was common sense.
Until we threw common sense out the window.
That's the first question.
Is porn bad?
Yeah, we should all agree with that.
And if you don't agree with that, I think you're kidding yourself.
An industry that exploits 18-year-old runaway girls and turns them into nothing more than flesh, that's not a good industry.
The next question is, can the government do something about it?
The libertarian immediately says, no, oh God, heaven forfend, clutch your pearls.
Yeah, of course the government can do something about that.
We regulate gambling, booze, and tobacco on the internet.
You need to prove that you're 21 to buy a pack of cigarettes online.
When I try to buy cigars online, it's difficult.
It should not be difficult.
We also should make it easier to buy cigars online.
It's an issue for another day.
You need an ID to buy a Playboy if you go up to a magazine rack.
So why is everybody so frazzled about the prospect of applying the exact same regulations that we have for cigarettes and nudie mags to internet porn?
Doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
There is no constitutional right to internet porn, okay?
There's this common objection to regulating porn, which is that it's un-American to regulate porn.
What are you talking about?
We have had obscenity laws in this country forever.
We currently have obscenity laws in this country.
We threw pornographers in jail under those obscenity laws 10 years ago.
Look, you might not like it.
You might say, well, we got to get rid of those obscenity laws.
Okay, but don't tell me it's un-American.
It's perfectly American.
The country was founded by religious zealot Puritans who left England for Leiden and left Leiden for America and practiced a very, very Puritanical form of Christianity, which I am not advocating.
But you can't say it's un-American.
You know, there's this common objection.
I think it's one of the most pernicious lies that people have bought into in politics, which is that you can't legislate morality.
That's what you hear.
You can't legislate morality.
Of course you can.
Not only can you, you must.
You cannot legislate without legislating morality.
We exclusively legislate morality.
What do I mean by that?
When you're arguing about tax rates, something as basic and boring as tax rates, you are using moral arguments.
You're saying, well, I have a right to my property, and I have some duty to the government, but because of my property rights, I should keep more of my property.
When you're arguing about health care, those are moral arguments.
We're on the right side of history.
We need to extend modern medical technology to everybody because that is good and right and just.
And the other side of the argument will say, how dare you?
You're totalitarian.
You're stealing my money.
You're infringing on my liberty, which is a God-given right, and I'm going to keep my liberty.
They're both making moral arguments.
Everybody makes the moral argument when it comes to health care and everything else.
Parking tickets.
Laws governing parking tickets involve moral arguments.
The rights to public land.
The rights to private property.
You do legislate morality, right?
When it comes to high-speed internet porn, it's a new problem.
It's a major social problem.
It has victims.
It's affecting people's health, especially young men.
It's more or less completely unregulated now.
There's double standards when it comes to other kinds of pornography and gambling and other vices.
And it's making us a bunch of wankers.
Do not be a wanker.
That's not a good country to have.
If you are a wanker, go to confession and try to stop.
But at the very least, forget the personal question.
Just from a social perspective.
From a political perspective.
We don't want to be a nation of wankers.
So we should take these questions seriously.
Before we go, I've got to get to Katie Hill.
Speaking of creepy, creepy sex.
You remember Katie Hill.
She is that former congressman.
Who was involved in a thruple with her husband and a female staffer who was right out of college and she sexually exploited this staffer and she put her on the payroll and she dumped her and she moved her away and the staffer was heartbroken.
If Katie Hill were a man, this would be the biggest sex abuse, sexual harassment case in all of Congress.
Or if Katie Hill were a Republican, same thing.
But because she's a Democrat woman, they're trying to make her seem like a victim.
The New York Times, absolutely shameless, publishes an op-ed.
Katie Hill, it's not over after all.
I overcame the desperation I felt after stepping down from Congress, and I'm still in the fight.
Here's what she writes.
On November 6, 2018, I was elected to Congress.
At 31, I was one of the youngest women ever elected to the House of Representatives.
One year later, I was sitting on a train to New York to meet with my lawyers about suing the Daily Mail for cyber exploitation.
And I was no longer a member of Congress.
Suing, because she's a victim.
She stepped up to a microphone.
Now notice, she doesn't actually deny the allegations.
She says that she has denied them, but she doesn't say they're not true.
Why?
Because they're obviously true.
And by the way, she obviously knew the photos were being taken.
She's looking at the camera in many of the photos.
So that's a lie too.
She goes on.
That day, oddly, I didn't get nervous the way I normally did.
I got every part of the routine right.
I felt calm and strong as I began to speak because I had to be.
I needed to say something to the countless people who had put their faith in me.
I needed to say something to the girls and young women who looked up to me.
I needed to make sure that my horrific experience did not frighten and discourage other women who will dare to take risks, dare to step into this light, dare to be powerful.
Katie Hill should dare to take a seat.
Sit down, sit this one out.
We've been told for a very long time that Shunning our moral responsibilities, shunning our conscience, shunning our duties to one another, shunning dignity is empowering.
That's good.
It's what we should strive for.
Overcome your conscience, follow your will, exert your will on others.
That's essentially the case made by Katie Hill.
That's the case made by the left.
That's a recipe for a terrible, terrible society.
We have to fix that.
We have to fix that through movies.
We have to fix that through plays.
We have to fix that through art and culture.
We also have to fix that in our politics.
Katie Hill is a political figure.
She needs to suffer political consequences for what she's done, and we need to acknowledge a politics that will acknowledge the culture that will make politics downstream of culture once again.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, for the past 20 years, the American suicide rate has been skyrocketing, which indicates to me that our corrupt elites have created a culture that leads to dislocation and despair.
Now President Trump has brought on the good times, and what do the elites want?
