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Jan. 16, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:26
Ep. 479 - When Democracy Fails

A giddy Nancy Pelosi pretends to be somber while signing the official impeachment resolution against President Trump and simultaneously doling out souvenir pens to her jackal colleagues. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin moves to consolidate power in yet another blow to representative government in Russia. We will examine how and why democracy fails. Then, Trump wins big in the trade war with China, CNN releases the Warren-Bernie exchange, and finally the Mailbag. If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at dailywire.com/Knowles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A giddy Nancy Pelosi pretends to be somber while signing the official impeachment resolution against President Trump and simultaneously doling out souvenir pens to her jackal colleagues.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin moves to consolidate power in yet another blow to democracy in Russia.
We will examine how and why democracy fails.
Then, President Trump wins big in the trade war with China.
And even left-wing outlets have to admit that his strategy, specifically his tariffs, worked.
While we all celebrate the economic and geopolitical victory, we will take a look at the more important win, the overthrow of conventional wisdom.
Then, CNN releases the audio from the post-debate Warren-Bernie exchange at Tuesday's Democratic primary debate because...
CNN is still trying to make Elizabeth Warren happen.
Stop trying to make Elizabeth Warren happen.
Elizabeth Warren is not going to happen.
Finally, the mailbag.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles show.
All right.
She's impeaching him.
There have been like seven different moments where this is the official impeachment.
Pelosi announced months ago, she said, we're starting the official impeachment inquiry.
Then they do the inquiry, then they take the official impeachment vote, but it wasn't totally official because she wouldn't deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate.
Then she signed the official impeachment resolution, and then her seven House managers delivered the official impeachment resolution.
And the fiction that they're all living under right now is that this is a very somber, serious day for America.
These House Democrats, they don't want to impeach the president.
They just have to because of that thing he did.
And we can't get too specific about it because, you know, it's very complicated.
But he did something.
He, the orange man, was bad.
And so we have to impeach him, but we don't want to.
Except they're giddy about it and they're eager to do it and they were ready to do it before they even figured out a tenuous reason to impeach him.
The impeachment managers include Representative Hakeem Jeffries from New York, Val Demings from Florida, Jason Crow from Wisconsin, Sylvia Garcia from Texas.
And Zoe Lofgren from California.
And then of course the two impeachment stars, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler.
Those are the people.
Now it's worth pointing out, of the impeachment managers, of the seven impeachment managers, six of them supported impeachment Before the Ukraine whistleblower complained.
So they're all saying that they don't want to impeach the president, but this matter on Ukraine that none of us can really describe because it's completely murky and a hoax and BS. Nevertheless, this incident with Ukraine is the reason that they have to impeach Trump, except six of the seven impeachment managers supported impeachment publicly before the whistleblower complained, before anybody knew anything about this Ukraine phone call.
So it's completely disingenuous.
It's insincere.
The most interesting person here of all of the impeachment managers is Zoe Lofgren.
The reason she's most interesting is Zoe Lofgren has been involved in three different impeachment processes.
It's pretty amazing.
She's involved, obviously, in this one.
She's an impeachment manager on Trump.
She was in the House since 1995, so she voted on the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
And she was actually working on the staff of Representative Don Edwards in the 1970s when Edwards and she helping him were preparing the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon.
Lofgren shows the problem here.
The increasing problem with impeachment and with our democracy, or our representative democracy, or our republic.
We'll get to the difference in a little bit.
She shows the problem.
We're impeaching too much.
We're impeaching too frequently.
This is not what the framers and the founders of our country had in mind.
We shouldn't just be throwing out the president every time there's a new congress in charge and they don't like the guy.
Democrats are pretending to be upset about the whole thing.
They love it.
And that is a big danger to our republic.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So they're giddy to do it.
They're so happy to deliver the impeachment resolution.
Nancy Pelosi was so happy to sign it.
As Nancy Pelosi is signing this impeachment resolution, so excited, President Trump was signing the trade deal with China.
Because after two years of a trade war with China, we were told, we're going to lose.
This is terrible.
The American people are getting killed in this.
What a dumb strategy.
It actually worked.
We got a very favorable trade deal.
So the Democrats, the best they can do is throw out the president who's doing a good job, and the president is delivering.
I mean, what an amazing two weeks for Trump.
Not every two weeks of his presidency has been like this, okay?
There have been a few moments that I've not been so thrilled about.
Some policy moves that I haven't been so happy with.
But the last two weeks, oh my gosh.
First of all, we get attacked by Iran twice.
Iran kills an American contractor and hits our Baghdad embassy.
Very perilous situation.
I mean, we're being attacked by a hostile foreign power.
Trump takes out their top guy.
Trump takes out the number two guy.
We now have heightened tensions with Iran.
They back down, so we establish deterrence.
Major geopolitical win.
And then on the heels of that, we finally ink the trade deal, which is, beyond all of the foreign affairs issues, the single most important issue right now facing the United States abroad.
More important than Iran, more important than North Korea, more important than anything in the Middle East, China.
China is the adversary.
China is the threat.
It's the threat to our economy.
It's the threat to our national security.
And finally, after so many years of nothing, we've got a deal on this.
It's really great news.
We'll get to that in a second.
But first, I just have to show you the hypocrisy of the Democrats.
Well, Trump is actually...
Helping out our economy, helping out our national security.
All they can do is try to throw him out and they're happy to do it.
So Pelosi, a little while ago, was giving an interview about impeachment.
And she said, it's a somber, serious, difficult, terrible, sad day for America when they have to impeach him.
Here she is.
This is a very sad time for our country.
There's no joy in this.
It's sad.
We must be somber.
We must be prayerful.
There's no joy in this.
If there's no joy in this, Nancy, then why are you smiling, grinning ear to ear while you sign the resolution?
You can see, if you saw the clip yesterday, she's signing this impeachment resolution, and she's got all of the...
Oh, and there she just looks up.
She's so happy.
She's never felt this way before.
Yes, she swears.
It's true, and she owes it all to those Democrats, how happy she is.
She gave away commemorative pens.
When presidents sign important pieces of legislation, The Affordable Care Act, right?
Obamacare.
Or major pieces of legislation like that.
They will sign their name only a little bit at a time.
A little part of one letter and then another letter and then another letter.
Because they want to switch the pens.
Because they want to be able to give out those souvenir pens to people to help remember this joyous occasion.
And it's a great piece of political swag in Washington.
Nancy Pelosi is doing that for impeachment.
She's giving out an actual celebratory souvenir for this somber, serious, sad day.
They're thrilled.
Why shouldn't they be thrilled?
For radical Democrats, impeachment is a huge win.
And I mean Democrats with a capital D, and I mean Democrats with a lowercase d.
Both kinds of Democrats, the Democrats of the party and the people who support pure radical democracy, both should be thrilled with impeaching the president.
If you're a purist Democrat with a lowercase d, You should hate this particular president.
You might hate the president in general, but you should hate this one in particular.
He was elected without the popular vote.
Right?
So right away, that's a problem.
And generally speaking, people who are pure, lowercase d Democrats, who want more power to the people, hate the executive branch.
And often hate a lot of our constitution.
You know, if you're a purist Democrat, if you really believe that 50% plus one should decide how we're governed, you should despise the Constitution.
Because the Constitution limits the rights of It limits the power of the people to define our rights.
I know that's a little confusing, right?
Because it gives rights to the people.
It acknowledges rights that the people have.
But it also limits the people's power to change those rights willy-nilly if half the population plus one decides to do it.
I mean, look at our gun rights, for instance.
Democrats are so upset, generally speaking.
The left liberals so upset that if the majority of liberals in any given area want to take away our gun rights, they can't do it because they're reined in by the constitution.
How about the judiciary?
The judiciary is very undemocratic.
Unfortunately, you'll often have bad judges try to legislate from the bench.
But as it is set up, the judiciary is there to put a hold on the will of the people.
To put a hold on democracy.
To restrain the desires of democracy and not let them do whatever they want.
How about the executive?
The executive is not beholden to the will of the people like the legislature is.
The executive gets elected every four years and it's elected through this mechanism of the electoral college.
So the votes are weighted a little bit differently and...
Smaller states have just as much of a say as larger states when it comes to part of the electoral college vote, but not the whole calculation.
It's a very complicated process set up by our founders and framers, unlike the legislature, which is up for election every two years and is the expression of the will of the people.
It is the expression of democracy, the nearest that we've got to it in our government.
What the founding fathers knew is that too much democracy can be a terrible thing.
We see that here.
We see that in Russia.
We'll get to that in a second because Vladimir Putin just dissolved his government.
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Our founding fathers knew that too much democracy is a terrible thing.
We have a great republic.
Another term for a republic you could say is a representative democracy.
It's not a pure democracy.
It's In many cases, it's not even super-duper democratic.
It's a representative democracy, a republic.
What's the difference?
We have representatives in place that express our desires.
We don't do it directly.
What's another difference?
We have constitutional limitations on our democracy.
If the majority of the people, if 99% of the people, if 100% of the people want to ban guns from America, they can't do it.
Because we have a constitution.
If 100% of the people in this country want to ban free speech, or want to establish a national church, or want to eliminate freedom of the press, they can't do it.
Because we do not have this pure democracy.
Because if we did have that pure democracy, it would be much, much worse, a much worse form of government than the republic that we have.
The current threat to our representative democracy is not too little democracy.
It's too much democracy.
We have been hacking away at our constitutional safeguards for over a century now.
We started it, well we started it a long, long time ago, but 1913, direct election of senators takes away the right of the states to elect the senators, takes away some of the delicate balance of our federal government, of our constitutional system.
Then in 1942, you get the Supreme Court decision, Wickard v.
Filburn dramatically increases the regulatory power of the federal government.
Reduces the power of the states.
Reduces that balance of power.
Another example that was just in the news, the War Powers Resolution in 1973.
Unconstitutional power grab by the Congress to take the constitutional power away from the executive.
What you're seeing is the power moving from state and local up to the federal government, and within the federal government you're seeing power coming into the legislature.
Constant power grabs.
And now that is culminating in this impeachment process.
Which has no legal basis, no constitutional basis.
It is simply a power grab from the legislature against the executive.
It is an attempt at congressional supremacy.
It's the idea that the president serves at the pleasure of the Congress.
And if the Congress, if there's an election and the Congress becomes democratic, then the Republican president's getting impeached.
And I guess the threat is vice versa.
If a Republican Congress gets elected, then the Democrat president is going to be impeached.
That's a system similar to the United Kingdom.
The UK has this parliamentary system, so it's just whatever party wins, they control the whole government.
It's very European.
It's very unstable.
It's not befitting a free American people.
Conservatives have a different idea than that.
Conservatives' idea is that We know there are costs to overthrowing our legal and political tradition like this.
The tradition that we've inherited from the founding fathers throughout all of the history of our country, it's not a simple system.
It's not totally clear.
You can't write it down on a little napkin, right?
It's complex.
It involves institutions like the Electoral College, which few people seem to be able to understand or articulate.
It involves this balance of power between the local, state, and federal, and the judiciary, and the executive, and the legislature.
It's very complicated.
We realize that there are costs to overthrowing all that and having a simple democracy or simply saying the legislature gets to pick the president, simply saying the majority rules.
When you overthrow that tradition, you are overthrowing a more important democracy than the democracy everybody talks about, change.
Chesterton explained this very well.
He said, tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.
It is the democracy of the dead.
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
It's a great way to think about the tradition.
It's the democracy of the dead.
You and I are here walking on this earth for a little blip of time.
We're the arrogant oligarchy of people who want to overthrow everything.
But what a power grab that would be.
What a tyranny to deprive our ancestors, once we're gone, of that great tradition.
What a tyranny it would be to disenfranchise the people who come after us and the people who have come before us.
In order for a country to be stable, To thrive, to flourish.
You need to have that sort of continuity.
And maybe you have to respect the wisdom of the ages because very likely your feeble powers of intellect are not enough to recreate the whole country from scratch.
Lots of people in the West right now are paying attention to another democracy falling apart.
Compare what's happening in the U.S. to what's happening in Russia.
Vladimir Putin right now is amending the Russian constitution and it's overthrowing his entire government.
So the prime minister, the putative prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, and his entire cabinet resigned yesterday.
I say the putative prime minister because when you think prime minister, you think somebody has a lot of power.
Nobody has power in Russia other than Vladimir Putin.
And Putin was the president, then he was briefly the prime minister, then he was the president again, and he switched roles with Medvedev, but Putin's been in charge for a very long time.
This move is a way for Putin to consolidate power.
Medvedev has been prime minister since 2012.
Before that, he was president in 2008 to 2012, but it was really just a trick of the Russian constitution so that Putin could stay in power without violating the constitution.
Now Putin wants to install some technocrat nobody who doesn't have a power base as prime minister and amend the constitution to give himself more power when he retires as president.
Lots of people in the West are upset about it because it's another blow to Russian democracy.
My response to that is, what Russian democracy?
When has Russia ever had a democracy or a republic or a representative government?
Never.
Never.
Never have they had a functioning democracy.
There was a brief period after the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1990s when there was this guy Boris Yeltsin.
Boris Yeltsin was the nearest thing that Russia has had to a democracy or a representative government.
And he was a drunk crook who left office with a 2% approval rating.
There's a story that he was visiting in Washington one time.
He somehow snuck out of the White House and was found carousing drunkenly on the streets of Washington.
Didn't work out very well.
Other than that, what do you have?
You have now Putin, who is the autocrat in Russia.
He just keeps himself in power.
You had a little blip of Boris Yeltsin, and you had the communists, communist dictators, and then you had the czars.
At no point have you had a functioning representative government.
Russia has always governed at the whims of czars.
And one reason that we pride ourselves in the West on being better than Russia is because we have this superior system of government.
And yet, increasingly, we are governing on the whims of czars too.
A tyranny of one is no worse than a tyranny of many.
It's tyranny all the same.
We will get to how we can fix that, then we'll get to the excellent Trump-China deal, and most importantly, The Bernie Warren moment at the end of that debate when they were very intense.
Well, CNN has leaked the audio because CNN is in the tank for Elizabeth Warren.
We'll get to what it means.
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That is ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. A tyranny of one is no better than a tyranny of a million or two million or three hundred million.
They're both tyranny.
Our founders set up a superior system that you can't boil down to slogans or bumper stickers.
Democracy, freedom, you actually can't do that.
It's much more complicated.
We don't need to destroy our representative democracy.
We don't need to be in a situation where the Congress is just throwing presidents out willy-nilly.
What we need to do is respect our traditions, our norms, our constitution, and perhaps most importantly of all, our fellow countrymen.
If we don't do that, we are headed for disaster.
But before we get to disaster, in the meantime, we got some great, great news yesterday that the mainstream media don't want to report on.
Donald Trump just won a major victory in the trade war with China.
Two-year trade war with China, and 20 years of hostilities with China, ever since we let China into the World Trade Organization.
They've been ripping us off, stealing our intellectual property, putting spyware in our software that they manufacture, taking our jobs, illegally subsidizing steel and aluminum, devaluing their currency.
I mean, they've been cheating left and right.
And this strategy seems to have worked.
When Trump said, I'm going to institute tariffs, we're getting into a trade war, baby.
Everybody, actually with the exception of Chuck Schumer, in Chuck Schumer's defense, Schumer was supportive of a tough strategy with China, as he had been for 20 years.
But it was pretty much Trump against the world, Trump against the Democrats, Trump against the libertarian types, Trump against the never-Trump Republicans, a lot of squishy people in his own party.
He said, I'm putting on tariffs.
They all said it'll never work.
China will back down.
Guess what?
The tariffs worked.
U.S. and China signed a trade deal.
This will lead to a sharp increase in the sales of U.S. goods and services to China.
They've got to do it fast.
Within the next year, China has to purchase an additional nearly $200 million worth of goods and services and provide strong new protections for trade secrets and intellectual property.
This is an eight-part agreement.
There will now pause the trade war.
Major, major deal.
Now, it does leave in place U.S. tariffs on about $370 billion of Chinese goods or about three-quarters of the Chinese imports into the United States.
So it's billion with a B. Sorry.
I was confused in my notes.
Billion with a B. Here is Jim Cramer.
Who is on CNBC, so not exactly a right-wing network.
This left-wing network, Jim Cramer, comes out, and he says what we're all thinking and what none of the experts knew, Trump's tariff strategy worked.
Jim, Mnuchin's appearance this morning did bring us something new, and that was the notion of phase 2A, phase 2B, phase 2C. So, stories evolving rapidly.
Look, I think that the takeaway for me is that tariffs worked.
If you go back in time, people just said, listen, tariffs won't work, won't change them.
The Chinese are all powerful.
Tariffs will hurt our consumer.
The consumer is going to see a lot of inflation, both at the producer level and the consumer level, ultimately, which is going to hurt the U.S. economy.
None of that happened.
The whole narrative is that China caved.
And China's going to continue to cave because we didn't take the tariffs off.
So I keep wondering when people are going to recognize that it is historic that tariffs did succeed.
They weren't supposed to work.
The Chinese are supposed to be able to get around them.
It didn't happen.
The Chinese were kind of accepting that they had to do something in order to keep the American market.
Absolutely right.
This is my favorite thing about the trade deal.
Not even that it's good for our economy, it's good for our geopolitical standing.
Not even that it's 20 years in the making.
Not even that the guy in my political party was right and everyone else, including people in my political party, were completely wrong.
That's not even my favorite part of it.
My favorite part of this trade deal is that it overthrows stale conventional wisdom.
Every 30, 40 years or so, you get this kind of ossified, stale, conventional wisdom.
You know, politics, because politics comes from ideas and then you've got to distill it and enact it and communicate it to people, this leads to talking points and bumper stickers and slogans.
And then people repeat these bumper stickers and slogans so often that they start to believe that that is the totality of politics.
So one of these being tariffs don't work.
If you asked five years ago, everybody, you polled 100% of Americans, do tariffs work?
Left, right, and center, 99% of them would have told you, tariffs don't work, tariffs never work, tariffs are a bad idea, beep boop, beep boop.
None of these people have an education in economics, none of these people know particularly much about global history or economic history, and yet they would have said that, because we just had decided, as a political people, Tariffs are always bad.
There's never a use for tariffs.
Then Trump comes in there.
He goes, yeah, I don't, sorry, I didn't go to all your fancy lunches at those think tanks, and I haven't been politically programmed on the same level as all you guys for the last 50 years.
So I think tariffs are going to work, and we're going to slap a ton of tariffs on China, and then they're going to get on their knees, and then we're going to get a good trade deal.
They said it'll never work.
It can't work because our slogans told us it wouldn't, because our narrow ideology and our conventional wisdom told us it wouldn't.
Yeah, well, it did.
So reality, as always, contradicted the narrow ideology.
Same thing on trade deficits.
We were told trade deficits don't matter.
That's not a big deal.
Well, if trade deficits don't matter, why do other countries work to reduce their trade deficits?
Trade deficits seem like they would matter, right?
What is a trade deficit?
It's how much you sell to another country versus how much that country sells to you.
There's got to be some effect of that, right?
If China is buying X amount of money, X amount of product from our country, and then they suddenly buy double that amount of product.
I think that's going to help us, isn't it?
If we get to sell more of our product to this huge market in China, why do we even want to get into these markets in the first place if it doesn't matter?
Of course it matters.
And Trump just knocked over this conventional wisdom.
It's very important in politics to get out of slogans.
You know, from...
From Nancy Pelosi's signing the impeachment resolution to Donald Trump signing the trade deal, you can see the kind of ossified, cold, conventional wisdom, and you can see opening up your mind to the possibilities of politics.
What do I mean by that?
Nancy Pelosi has one guiding star in politics right now, and that is orange man bad.
The Democrats are really not considering the What if the American people have the right to pick their own president?
What if the Congress doesn't have the right to overthrow a presidential election just because they want to?
What if there are constitutional safeguards?
What if there is a legal basis for impeachment?
What if tariffs work?
All these things that the left is not considering right now.
If we get down this narrow path and we try to oversimplify our government, we're headed for disaster.
If we appreciate the tradition that we have, if we respect the norms that we maybe can't rationally articulate, but we know they've served us well for a long time, maybe that will help us.
And if we crack out of this stale conventional wisdom that crops up every couple decades, I think we'll have a much better chance looking at the whole body of our American political inheritance.
Before we get to the mailbag today, I've just got to get to this wonderful, wonderful Bernie and Elizabeth Warren clip from the debate.
So you saw they were kind of angry.
They weren't shaking hands at the end of the debate.
CNN, because they had their lavalier microphones, just leaked the audio of that exchange.
Here it is.
You called me a liar on national TV. What?
I think you called me a liar on national TV. Let's not do it right now.
You want to have that discussion, we'll have that discussion.
You called me.
You told me.
All right, let's not do it now.
I don't want to get in the mail, but I just want to say hi, Bernie.
Yeah, good.
Okay.
What an amazing exchange.
The best part of it being Tom Steyer, who is just like that kid when you're staying over at your friend's house and the two parents start fighting with each other and you're just in the kitchen trying to get a glass of water.
That's what Tom Steyer was.
Hey, just wanted to say hi, Bernie.
He seems like a pretty nice guy, and he wears that nice tartan tie, Tom Steyer.
He's also the richest guy on that stage by far, so you'd think Bernie would say, like, hey, Tom, please give me a donation later.
But it's a very charming moment at the end.
The meat of that exchange, though, of course, is at the beginning.
Elizabeth Warren comes over.
She says, I think you called me a liar on TV. Bernie said, what are you, what?
You called me a liar.
Right?
We are describing different things that happened.
We're describing one event and you're saying this happened and I'm saying not this happened.
So you called me a liar too, but let's not do this here, Elizabeth.
Why would you want to do this on stage with our microphones on?
You could have done it during the debate too.
It doesn't make sense.
Until you realize that Elizabeth Warren is a liar and CNN is in the tank for her.
This is obviously a setup.
Why would CNN release this audio if it weren't a setup for Warren?
The way you can tell who is telling the truth here is that, one, Elizabeth Warren leaked it right before the debate, and she leaked it to CNN because CNN was hosting the debate.
And then at the very end, she approaches Bernie.
She didn't get her good hit in During the debate itself, she didn't get a good clip from that.
So she walks up and very, very awkwardly sets him up to have to respond.
Doesn't sound natural.
She walks up very awkwardly and says, what does my script say?
I think you called me a liar on TV. What do you say now?
What are you going to say now, Bernie?
And he's so caught off guard by this.
You called me a liar.
Why are we doing this here?
See you later, Liz.
I have to give it to Bernie on this occasion.
I think he's the one telling the truth and I think she's a liar.
Why do I think that?
She is one of the most notorious liars in the country.
And if she's not lying, let's give her the benefit of the doubt.
Let's say that this meeting took place two years ago and Bernie said, I don't think a woman could win in 2020, which I don't believe for a second.
But let's say that happened.
Still, we have to believe Bernie here.
Because Elizabeth Warren is the boy who cried wolf.
Elizabeth Warren said she was a Native American Indian for her entire career.
For professional benefit.
Complete lie.
She just recently said that her child went to private school.
That was a lie.
She said that she was fired from her teaching job because she was pregnant.
That was a lie.
She contradicted it herself.
She lies all the time.
All the time.
And yet Bernie Sanders, when you think of all of the false statements he's made in his career, and there are many of them, all the crazy ideologies spattered in his career, there's a lot of it.
You can't find too many lies.
He doesn't lie very much.
And there's a video of Bernie decades ago saying he thinks a woman could be president.
You've got to give it to Liz Warren.
Even if in this actual event, Bernie Sanders actually did say what she said he said.
You've got to give the liar award to Elizabeth Warren.
That's the only rational judgment you can make.
And the CNN setup here, total stab-in-the-back setup, is classic.
You know, last go-around 2016, CNN gave the debate questions to Hillary Clinton when she was debating Bernie Sanders.
They did that because the corporate media hates Bernie Sanders.
I don't like Bernie Sanders either, but we have different reasons for it.
But the corporate media certainly hates him.
They're trying to pick Elizabeth Warren.
They're now calling her a snake in the grass, and I have to say that the Democratic base, left-wing base, that calls her a snake in the grass is clearly pretty right.
All right, let's get to the mailbag.
First, I've got to say about Facebook and YouTube.
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All right, we've got the mailbag, so let's get right into it.
I always run late, so we've got to hurry up.
From Sam.
Hi, Michael.
I've worked at a summer camp for the past five years.
Today I got my contract for the upcoming summer, and they've given me a demotion and a pay cut.
I feel like I should start looking for jobs at other camps, but the reason I wanted to run a camp in the first place was for these kids.
I've been working with the same group of kids since they were 8 and now they're 14.
Am I abandoning the principles that made me want to go into the camping industry if I take a job at another camp?
Thanks for all you do.
No.
You should get another job.
I mean, it's great to support the kids.
It's great to love what you do.
It's great to enjoy the work that you're doing, but you can't be disrespected like that.
If you're really taking a pay cut, if you're really being demoted, that's showing a disrespect from your employers.
Now, maybe it was your fault.
Let's entertain that possibility.
Let's say you weren't doing your job that well, so they bumped you down a little bit.
Okay, maybe that means you've got to get a little better at your job, figure out how you can thrive in that role.
I guess you could do that at your current camp, or you could do it somewhere else.
Or, in the other situation, maybe they're not showing you respect as an employee and you've got to move on.
That's the way life works.
They're great jobs, but sometimes you've just got to move on and you'll find another group of kids and you'll be stronger in your profession.
From Grant.
Hello, Michael.
I recently took your advice and parted ways with my ex-girlfriend of five years who didn't want kids in the future.
She blocked me after I deleted her pictures from my social media.
I miss her dearly and I don't know how to get over it.
You mentioned reading Ovid's Remedy for Love and I simply cannot comprehend it.
Any advice on how to read Ovid and or get over my ex?
Thank you for all you do and for your consistent spreading of the word of Christ.
Well, I'm sorry, you know, you're going through this difficult situation.
I do remember your question, Grant, from last time, which was, if I'm remembering correctly, it was that you and your girlfriend had broken up, but you kept seeing each other, and she was kind of stringing you along, but she said that you guys have to take some time off, and she didn't know if she wanted to...
You know, have kids or kind of live the life you want to live.
And my advice last time was, don't let your ex-girlfriend string you along.
Never do that.
Never, ever do that.
It won't help you win her back, and it will degrade you.
So, if you still really like her a lot, I guess there's a chance you could get back together.
That happens.
But it's not going to happen if you keep seeing your ex-girlfriend all the time and hanging around and saying, you're my best friend and I love you so much.
Ain't going to work.
It's true that Ovid is a little tough for the modern audience.
It's even more difficult because it's translated from Latin.
How can you take Ovid's advice for getting over an ex-girlfriend?
Well, you're already doing it.
Ovid has a lot of advice.
He says, stop seeing her.
Don't see her.
Destroy all her pictures.
That's another piece of advice.
He says destroy all her portraits.
And you're deleting her Facebook pictures.
Okay, that's about the same thing.
Another bit of advice that Ovid, a pagan, gives is to sleep around with a lot of women right away.
Now, you're a Christian, so you probably don't want to do that.
But you could start going on dates.
You could start pursuing other romantic relationships.
And you should do that immediately.
You must move on.
If you're really going to break up.
You don't want to be in that middle ground.
Either be together and get married and have a life together, or completely break up and move on.
And by the way, if you do completely break up and move on, a year or two years from now, you might end up getting back together because she's going to realize she made a huge mistake and come running back to you.
But what is not going to work is if you are in this middle ground where you're kind of hanging around saying, please, please, love me, love me.
That is not going to help anybody.
It's not going to help you win your girlfriend back.
It's not going to help you move on.
You should operate from the position that this relationship is over.
It's not going to work.
No knock on her.
You just want different things in life and you are going to move on and then see what happens from there.
Best of luck, my friend.
From Ian.
Hi, Michael.
Since the Democrats are pushing for taxpayer-funded abortions over reproductive rights, should Republicans push taxpayer-funded firearms for Second Amendment rights?
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, not seriously.
I don't want the government involved in giving me guns because I don't trust the government to do that and I don't want to expand the government in that way.
But it's the same argument.
I mean, they say, we have a right to abortion, so the taxpayers have to pay for it.
We have a right to condoms, so the taxpayers have to pay for it.
First of all, you don't have a right to either of those things.
But second of all, even if you did, there is a difference between positive rights, which require somebody else's effort and labor and money and the government to pay for it, and negative rights, which is freedom from interference.
Freedom from you punching me.
Freedom from you taking my life.
Freedom from you infringing on my property.
When our government was set up, and we talk about rights, Our founding fathers had a particularly negative view of rights.
Freedom from.
And so a great way to highlight that hypocrisy for the left would be to say, okay, great.
You're right.
You have a right to birth control or abortion.
You're right.
The government should provide that.
But I have an actual constitutional right to a gun, so give me my AR-15, baby.
See what they say to that.
From Deb.
Do you think Salami Man, Soleimani, will replace Che Guevara as the liberals' new poster boy for decades to come?
Honestly?
Maybe.
I mean it.
I know it seems insane that you could get this Islamic terrorist, you know, killed thousands of civilians to be a poster boy and have him on t-shirts for the left.
They did it to Che Guevara.
Che Guevara wasn't an Islamic terrorist.
I guess he was a Latino terrorist.
But he killed a ton of civilians.
He was responsible for untold human misery.
He was a total sociopath.
And they put him on their shirts.
The left, particularly the intellectual left, has always loved violence.
They love violence.
They usually don't fight themselves.
But they love the idea of violence.
You see this in all of the despotisms of the 20th century, supported by top intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht.
All the way back to the Enlightenment, these guys support violence.
And so I wouldn't be surprised if the left does it too.
It's totally perverse.
And the key is, the left doesn't know the history of Che Guevara, and they don't know anything about Sulibati.
They're already crying over his death, so I wouldn't be surprised if they threw him on a t-shirt.
Last question, Taylor.
Michael, what are the names of your ancestors who came over on the Mayflower?
On Christmas break, my wife found out that she has an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower too.
I want to know if you're distant cousins.
I have four.
The pilgrim was Dr.
Samuel Fuller.
The other three were what's known as strangers.
So they weren't the pilgrims.
They were the other guys who came over on the Mayflower.
And that is Stephen Hopkins.
He was a mutineer.
And he was actually on the shipwreck in the Caribbean that Shakespeare's play The Tempest is based on.
Francis Eaton.
He was a sort of ne'er-do-well, but got along just fine in Plymouth.
And John Billington, who was the first man executed for murder in the New World.
So, you know, we had that one good pilgrim doctor and then a bunch of derelicts and degenerates.
And they may be the derelicts and degenerates from whom your wife comes as well.
Maybe we're cousins.
Alright, that's our show.
Unfortunately, though, by the way, if your wife and I are cousins, then she's also cousins by law with Hillary Clinton.
So sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Have a good weekend.
I'll see you on Monday.
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