Bloomberg smacked Bernie, Warren scalped Bloomberg, and Joe Biden wrecked himself. We will examine the highlights from the wildest 2020 Democratic debate so far and specifically how Mike Bloomberg fundamentally misunderstands the presidency. Then, AOC wants billionaires to disappear, and the moralists of modernity at Slate Magazine can’t quite explain why it’s wrong to sleep with your brother.
Check out The Cold War: What We Saw, a new podcast written and presented by Bill Whittle at https://www.dailywire.com/coldwar. In Part 1 we peel back the layers of mystery cloaking the Terror state run by the Kremlin, and watch as America takes its first small steps onto the stage of world leadership.
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Bloomberg smacked Bernie, Warren scalped Bloomberg, and Joe Biden wrecked himself.
We will examine the highlights from the wildest 2020 Democratic debate so far, and specifically how Mike Bloomberg fundamentally misunderstands the presidency.
Then, AOC wants billionaires to disappear, and the moralists of modernity at Slate Magazine can't quite explain why it's wrong to sleep with your brother.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Hoo boy, is there a lot to get to.
Mike Bloomberg finally makes the Democratic debates interesting.
Sparks flew.
This was a brutal, brutal debate.
We saw firsthand, because of this debate, pretty much everything that's wrong with modernity.
I mean, it was the most broad overview of everything that's gone wrong with the Democrats, with liberalism, with leftism, with modernity.
We'll get to all that in a second.
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All right.
What a crazy debate.
Everybody came out of this debate looking terrible.
The radicals, the liberals, the billionaires, the everybody looked terrible, but especially, especially Mike Bloomberg.
And this was to be expected.
This started right out the door of the debate.
Mike Bloomberg shows up.
Everybody is going after him, and Bloomberg simply wasn't prepared.
So Warren kicked it all off by attempting.
She later completed this, but she attempted to just absolutely end Bloomberg's campaign before it began.
I'd like to talk about who we're running against.
A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians.
And no, I'm not talking about Donald Trump.
I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg.
Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk.
All right.
Bloomberg's team completely blew this if they did not prepare him for this question.
This was obviously going to be a big question because it's very difficult to attack Mike Bloomberg.
He's had an extremely successful career.
He's a Democrat, so he holds most of the politically correct political positions.
But because he runs any large enterprise, there are these NDAs and, you know, obviously there's always HR issues.
So they're going to try to portray Mike Bloomberg, who's a very good manager of these enterprises, as some kind of sexual predator.
Because what?
Because he made a joke 20 years ago or something.
Bloomberg should have seen that coming.
His team didn't prep him.
No surprise that the geniuses who thought that a campaign strategy was putting Bloomberg's face on a meatball on social media, that somehow they would botch debate prep.
But what's so crazy about that moment is Bloomberg could have seen it coming because it's the exact moment that happened to Trump in his debate four years ago, And you remember that first debate, Trump comes out there, everyone's gunning for Trump, and they tried to hit him on the same thing.
They said, you've made mean jokes about women.
And Megyn Kelly was the moderator, and she said, Mr.
President, or not, he wasn't president then, said, Mr.
Trump, you've called women fat and ugly and terrible.
And instead of doing what Mike Bloomberg did, which was wilt and don't say anything, and then you say, I'm sorry, Trump leaned right into it.
You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.
Only Rosie O'Donnell.
No, it wasn't.
One of the most memorable lines in presidential debates, and I remember watching it in real time in 2016 and thinking, oh man, this guy's really got something.
This guy is not going to be pushed around.
This guy understands how to play the media.
And Bloomberg blew it.
Now, Bloomberg couldn't have used the exact same line.
They couldn't have said, Mike Bloomberg, you've called...
Women, horse-faced lesbians.
And then Bloomberg leans in and says, only Susie in accounting.
Yeah, that obviously isn't going to work.
But he could have gotten aggressive.
Okay, if this is going to be the line of attack on brash New York billionaires, which is that they make off-color jokes, he could have leaned into it and gone on the attack and been even more brash and said, you know, Elizabeth, you're one of the most notorious liars in the country.
You lied about your DNA for decades and took jobs away from Native Americans.
You lied about where your kids go to school.
You lied about being fired for being pregnant.
So excuse me if I don't take you seriously.
I shouldn't be surprised that you would lie about me too.
If he just leaned in and made it an attack, I think people would have stood up and loved him for it.
You know, nobody wants this awful lying, dishonest woman to Hector, some guy who's had a very successful career in business.
That doesn't look good to most Americans.
But if she's going to be able to push him around, then she's gonna win the exchange, which is exactly what happened.
On the issues, not the style necessarily, but the issues, Bloomberg was actually pretty good.
I mean, this was by far the best he did all night.
He got some pretty good zingers in at Bernie Sanders.
Bernie was really going after him for being a billionaire.
Now you remember Bernie Sanders used to go after the millionaires and billionaires, but then Bernie made over a million dollars.
So all of a sudden the millionaires were okay and it was only the billionaires.
I mean, Bernie Sanders, a total fraud and Mike Bloomberg called him out for it.
He had one of the great lines of the night.
He said, what a great country we live in that the most famous socialist in the country is a millionaire with three houses.
Bloomberg, would you like that?
The question was about socialism.
What a wonderful country we have.
The best-known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses.
What'd I miss here?
Well, you'll miss that I work in Washington, House 1.
That's the first problem.
Live in Burlington, House 2.
That's good.
And like thousands of other Vermonters, I do have a summer camp.
Forgive me for that.
Where is your home?
Which tax haven do you have your home?
New York City, thank you very much, and I pay all my taxes.
Oh my gosh, absolutely a devastating response.
Because Bernie is an obvious fraud, okay?
He's a multi-millionaire, right?
He's got all these houses, and yet he claims to be a man of the people and a socialist.
This is a guy who's...
Hasn't done any productive work in his entire life.
He was a vagrant who got kicked off of a commune.
Then he realized that his best chance at success was working in government.
And then he did that for the rest of his life.
And then he whined and complained.
He didn't even accomplish anything there in government itself.
So Bloomberg goes out and he goes, yeah, Bernie, you're a complete fraud and you're a millionaire and you have multiple houses.
And Bernie had no answer for that.
Bernie said, okay, well, yeah, I work in Washington.
And Bloomberg, you've got that New York, that dry, just hits you.
He goes, yeah, that's the first problem.
And Bloomberg didn't have an answer, or Bernie, rather, didn't have an answer for his third home because it's a summer home.
He goes, well, I have a summer home.
Like, you know, so many Americans.
Do so many Americans have summer homes?
Well, it's news to me.
I guess I got to become one of those so many Americans because I sure would love a summer home.
So he really gets that zing in there.
And even then he tries to deflect it by hitting Bloomberg on having a tax haven.
But Bloomberg doesn't live in a tax haven.
He lives in New York and pays extremely high taxes.
So that was a great line.
Speaking of taxes, there was a wonderful exchange where Bernie said, you know, the billionaires pay lower taxes than the middle class, which is simply not true.
But Bloomberg actually got a great line of attack and he leans in and he says, Bernie, who writes the tax code?
Right?
Bloomberg just runs a business.
Bernie Sanders is a senator.
Right?
It's the politicians who write the tax code, right?
So then Bernie tries to flip it.
He says, the billionaires write that.
I mean, the politicians, at the behest of the billionaires, write the tax code.
So Bernie's admitting that the politicians are all bought off.
But then the punchline was, Bloomberg leans in there, he says, Bernie, most billionaires are Democrats.
And they are.
It's true.
I think of the 10 richest people in the country, seven of them are Democrats.
There are two billionaires in the Democratic presidential primary right now, Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer.
All the most famous billionaires we can think of, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, right?
They all are leaning left.
Mike Bloomberg.
They all lean left.
They're virtually all Democrats.
So these were all great, really good hits.
Then Bloomberg moves on from those good zingers and shows the radicalism of the Democratic Because he says, look guys, we're not going to destroy capitalism.
We're not going to all of a sudden become communist.
Communism doesn't work.
And do you know what happened?
When Bloomberg said communism doesn't work, he got booed by the audience and by the other candidates.
I can't think of a ways that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get re-elected than listening to this conversation.
LAUGHTER It's ridiculous.
We're not going to throw out capitalism.
We tried that.
Other countries tried that.
It was called communism and it just didn't work.
Oh, hold on a sec.
You're going to go after communism now?
Hold on.
I don't know about that, guys.
You see Elizabeth Warren, it like pains her when he says communism just didn't work.
She goes, well, hold on.
You look at Bernie.
It looks like he's about to collapse.
What do you mean communism doesn't work?
So...
It's a wild moment because five years ago, even five, six years ago, if you had told me that a democratic debate would mention communism and an attack on communism would get booed, I'd say, no, that's crazy.
That's too radical even for them.
I mean, consider the fact, just in the Bloomberg questioning, the Democrats went wild for an attack over a sex joke, but they booed an attack on communism.
Liz Warren goes after Bloomberg because he made a joke about women like once.
And wild applause.
And then Bloomberg said, hey guys, I think communism's bad.
And boos from the audience and from the other candidates.
But Bloomberg was not deterred.
He tripled down on economic freedom.
They were good issue points.
But then he totally blew it in the end.
We'll get to that in a second.
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K-N-O-W-L-E-S. That is T-E-C-O-V-A-S. So, Bloomberg triples down on this, right?
He is not going to get rid of economic freedom.
He's not going to get rid of capitalism.
He's asked at one point by a moderator.
This is pretty amazing.
Do you think that you should have made all that money that you made?
Because I love when people feel they're entitled to everybody else's stuff.
And that's somehow virtuous.
That the vice of envy is now somehow a virtue on the left.
But that's the question that's asked.
Do you think you should have made all that money?
And Bloomberg says, you're damn right I should have.
Mayor Bloomberg, should you exist?
I can't speak for all billionaires.
All I know is I've been very lucky, made a lot of money, and I'm giving it all away to make this country better.
And a good chunk of it goes to the Democratic Party as well.
Is it too much?
Have you earned too much money?
Has it been an obscene amount of money?
Should you have earned that much money?
Yes.
I worked very hard for it.
Great answer!
I love too, Bloomberg has to catch it.
He's like, by the way, I am using a lot of my money to bribe the Democratic Party.
Don't forget, it's not just that I'm making it and stimulating the economy and donating to charity.
I'm also bribing your party.
So, you know, that's okay.
That's the only reason I'm in the debate right now.
It's because I made a $300,000 donation to the Democrats right before I got in the race.
So, just want to let you know, I'm using my money wisely.
Obviously, a little grift and cronyism going on here in the Democrats, but...
He makes a very good point.
He goes, I worked very hard and I'm giving all my money away.
Think about how much money Mike Bloomberg gives to charity.
He's one of the most philanthropic men in the country.
How much money do you give to charity?
How much money does Chuck Todd give to charity?
How much money do any of the Democrats on stage?
Bernie Sanders, oh my God, I don't know that guy ever gave to charity.
It's a pretty low amount according to his tax returns.
So, I like that he tripled down on that.
I thought Bloomberg made some good issue points.
His style was not terribly effective.
I got a kick out of it as a New Yorker, but it wasn't very effective.
Overall, the debate was a loser for Bloomberg.
It was a big loser.
And the reason is he didn't accomplish the one thing that he was supposed to accomplish at this debate.
He didn't connect with voters.
Why else would he have shown up to this debate?
He was already buying the primaries.
His numbers were surging, even though he had never appeared on a stage.
Right?
He was just buying a ton of airtime, spent like half a billion dollars or something.
Why show up and open yourself up to all of these attacks which he got?
The only reason to do it is to connect with voters.
To show you're not afraid.
To show that you got something here.
He didn't do that.
If anything, he distanced himself from voters.
Right?
Nowhere is that clearer than in his response to a challenge, one of these dumb political challenges.
They say, are you going to release your tax returns?
Now, I don't think politicians are obligated to release their tax returns, and actually in the post-Trump era, I don't know that they will be required to.
But it's one of these old lines, and they especially use it against businessmen, because the tax returns of politicians are very easy, because they don't work in the productive economy.
Whereas the tax returns of businessmen are very complicated, and so there's a lot to pick apart and use in attack ads.
And Bloomberg says, look, okay, I'll release my tax returns, but...
I'm a billionaire with businesses all around the world.
It's not so easy.
But he gave an answer that seemed pretty condescending and a little offensive to the regular old American voter.
Your campaign has said that you would eventually release your tax records when it comes to transparency.
But people are already voting now.
Why should Democratic voters have to wait?
It just takes us a long time.
Unfortunately or fortunately, I make a lot of money and we do business all around the world and we are preparing it.
The number of pages will probably be thousands of pages.
I can't go to TurboTax.
I gotta tell you, I actually really liked this line.
I thought it was pretty funny.
Because it's such an obvious point.
It's like, look, guys, I know you think that releasing my taxes is like I click print on my computer, but I'm Michael Bloomberg, okay?
I've got a ton of business interests everywhere.
This will be thousands of pages long.
And yeah, you can't go to TurboTax, right?
You can't walk to H&R Block and have them prepare your taxes.
A very funny line, but it seems a little sneering, too.
Right?
So it's funny, like, for a stand-up, and it's funny if you have a connection to voters.
I think Trump could have gotten away with that line.
Because Trump has this connection to voters.
You have the real sense that Trump really likes his voters.
He really likes his supporters.
He really likes his countrymen.
Right?
You don't get that sense with Bloomberg.
And so, with Bloomberg, it just...
It emphasizes, it underlines the major weakness of his campaign, which is that he seems like this elitist who doesn't like people, who doesn't care about people, who doesn't want to be listening to their concerns.
So, oh, I can't go to TurboTax like you little people, like you peasants.
I'm Michael Bloomberg.
So he took a line that could have been pretty funny and just blew it because of his attitude.
Then he blew it worst of all.
This was the moment nobody is talking about this.
But I actually think it was the worst moment of the entire debate for Bloomberg.
And I didn't see anybody really mention it on Twitter.
In his closing statement, Mike Bloomberg finally makes the case for why you should elect him.
And he revealed that he fundamentally misunderstands the American presidency.
He said his big case for why you should elect him is that the presidency is a management job and he's a good manager.
This is a management job, and Donald Trump's not a manager.
This is a job where you have to build teams.
He doesn't have a team, so he goes and makes decisions without knowing what's going on and the implications of what he does.
We cannot run the railroad this way.
This is so wrong.
This is so incorrect.
The presidency is not a management job, primarily.
Obviously, there's a little bit of managing going on.
I guess there's a little bit of managing that goes on in most jobs.
But the presidency is not primarily a management job.
And it just reveals why nobody really supports what Bloomberg thinks.
Not the left, not the right, probably not even the center.
Mike Bloomberg is a neoliberal technocrat.
That would be the precise term for him.
He looks at all the political problems of the world and he doesn't think of them in terms of great ideas or philosophy or the theological basis of those ideas or what moves and stirs the human soul.
He thinks about them from the perspective of getting a little more efficiency out of the market, of just putting a few experts in there, and if they're smart enough, if they got more gray matter, like Bloomberg said the other day, then they'll be able to get a little more money out of the economy, and then everybody will go along because we've got this perfect technical vision of the world.
And that's not how the world works.
But that's how Mike Bloomberg's always thought of politics.
When Mike Bloomberg ran for mayor of New York, he said, we can't have more than two terms for mayor.
Then he becomes mayor.
He says, all right, we're going to add a third term.
Why?
Because I'm the expert.
I'm Mike Bloomberg.
I can do whatever I want.
Rules don't apply to me.
Then he gets the third term and he takes away the third term for everybody else.
He finally gets booted out of power in New York.
And do you know what the next job was that he wanted?
It wasn't president right away.
He considered becoming mayor of London.
There was a real push for Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, to become the mayor of London.
That's so weird, right?
He's not English.
He didn't live in England.
Why would he become...
Because to Mike Bloomberg, running these cities, it's all the same.
It's all cookie cutter.
You just have to get the right technical systems in place and, you know, build teams and have good retreats and then implement these good PowerPoint...
Strategies and models, and then the city will run the right way.
And it has nothing to do with the ideas that lead politics.
It has nothing to do with actually accomplishing something in politics beyond efficiency.
It has nothing to do with the people.
Right?
To Mike Bloomberg, yeah, okay, New Yorkers...
Englishmen, Londoners, whoever.
You can substitute any people.
It doesn't matter.
But of course, people are the most important thing in politics.
Politics is how we people all get along in society.
And Bloomberg just fundamentally doesn't get it.
Our framers did not think that the presidency was a management job.
Our founders and framers thought that the presidency was the spirited part of the government.
This is where some people on the right get it wrong, too.
Some people on the right say, ah, the president is just a regular bureaucrat, just like anybody else.
No, he isn't.
The presidency, as the framers intended, is not just some random bean counter.
He's not just some random bureaucrat.
He's the spirit, the embodiment of the spirit of the government.
When the framers set up our government, it's in three parts, right?
The judiciary, the legislature, and the executive.
Those three parts are designed to correspond to the three parts of the human soul.
They're designed to correspond in the judiciary.
That corresponds to the logical part of the soul.
The legislature responds to the emotional part of the soul.
And the executive responds to the spirited part of the soul.
In Greek, it would be the logos, the pathos, and the ethos.
It's the three divisions of the soul, the three divisions of government.
They work very well.
But it's about the soul.
It's about people.
It's about great forces that move us, not just making some plastic goods a little bit cheaper and markets a little bit more efficient.
That's why Bloomberg doesn't get it, and that's why very likely, even beyond all the other attacks on him all night, that is why very likely he's not going anywhere.
The other candidates are all jokers, too.
We've got to get to AOC, by the way, being the...
We've got to get to why Slate Magazine doesn't understand that a sister should not have sex with her brother.
We'll get to all of that plus the mailbag first.
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Okay.
All the other candidates were That's no surprise at all.
The winner was Bernie.
Bernie won.
Warren did pretty well too, but that's only because the moderators refused to go after her weaknesses.
Moderators have gone after every other candidate.
They haven't gone after Warren.
They've gone after Buttigieg on race.
They've gone after Sanders on his alleged statement that women can't be president.
They went after Bloomberg obviously on everything.
They went after Amy for forgetting the name of a foreign leader, but they don't go after Warren.
Why?
Warren is the weakest of the candidates.
She lied about being a Native American for her whole career.
Probably took a job away from an actual Native American.
She's lily white.
Then lied about her kid's school.
Then lied about getting fired for being pregnant.
Then just lies, lies, lies.
But they won't go after her.
And I think the reason they won't go after her...
For the Indian thing is because it looks like a Trump attack.
It's an attack that Trump has now totally owned.
They don't want to be accused of playing into a Trump attack.
They don't want to be accused of being harsh on women.
They don't want to be accused of any of that.
So they just go easy on her.
And even with all of that, she's still not doing very well in the polls.
All radical candidates on that stage last night, with maybe the sort of exception of Mike Bloomberg, who got clobbered.
What this shows us is that someone like AOC, who the DNC chairman Tom Perez said last year or two years ago was the future of the Democratic Party, it shows that she's not just some strange outlier or some exception.
She really, really is the future of that party.
While all the candidates were debating on stage with Bloomberg, AOC went on The View to actually serve up one of the questions from the debate.
AOC went on The View.
One of the questions from the debate from Chuck Todd was, hey, Mike Bloomberg, should you exist?
That was from AOC who said explicitly on The View, billionaires, our fellow countrymen, citizens of America, should not exist.
Here's the thing is that if the amount of money that you have can force the DNC to change their rules, but the DNC would not change their rules for Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, that is an actualization of power.
And we all know how I feel about billionaires.
I don't think that in a place where 60% of Americans can't even You know, make more than $40,000 a year that the presence of a billionaire who largely makes their money off of businesses underpaying their workers like Walmart, like Amazon, like so on, should exist.
Billionaires should not exist.
They shouldn't exist.
Now, when you couple that with what we're hearing from the rest of the Democrats, the activists in the field, guys like one of Bernie Sanders' current campaign workers who said that after the revolution, they're going to line up all the bourgeois and send them to the gulag.
They're going to line them up on the wall and kill them.
That's like actually what a campaign worker for Bernie said.
And you hear this kind of language, it gets you a little worried because every radical socialist communist regime in history has, has had to liquidate classes of peoples.
Liquidate is another word for murder.
They've had to purge people.
They've had to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.
So that kind of language is not great.
And you're hearing it from the young, fresh face of the party, AOC. Not a good sign.
Not a good sign for the country.
The one glimmer of hope, however...
Is that AOC is a hypocrite.
And AOC revealed that in the same interview with The View because she castigated all those rich men and yet, right now she's campaigning for a rich man.
Our entire political system revolves, frankly, around rich men.
And rich men are not the center of my universe.
Working families are.
Yeah, okay, AOC. Well, what's interesting is AOC, the reason she hasn't been doing her job lately is because she's on the campaign trail for Bernie Sanders, who is a very rich man.
He's an old rich man.
That's like three strikes against him.
So, that is a lie.
I mean, what she's trying to say, oh, men, rich men, they're not the center of my universe.
Working families are.
AOC doesn't answer the phone in her district office for those working families, but she does spend a lot of time on the campaign trail for Bernie Sanders.
That's a little glimmer of hope.
However, if we've, if the best hope we've got is Democrats hypocrisy, I mean, that's something we can rely on, but it doesn't say very much about the Democratic Party.
Before we get to the mailbag, I've got to talk about the grossest, the grossest article.
This was in Slate.
It was a letter written into Slate Magazine.
It's called, My Wife Wants Us to Have Sex with Her Brother.
Not just that she wants to have sex with her brother, but she wants them both to.
Here's the letter.
Dear, how to do it.
My wife and I have been in an open marriage for five years.
So they're cheating on each other.
They sleep with other people.
On the whole, our relationship has been uncommonly open and supportive.
Definitely uncommonly open.
playfully push the limits romantically and sexually.
For as long as I've known her, my wife has been interested in incest role play.
Okay.
While it isn't my cup of tea exactly, I've been willing and happy to support her in her exploration of this kind of fantasy and role play.
Often she will have me dress up as her father, wear his cologne, et cetera, while she will wear her high school clothes.
Okay.
Recently, though, things have started to move in an uncomfortable direction.
Recently.
Not before that.
All that other stuff was comfortable.
Wearing your dad's cologne.
Totally normal.
But now, it's moving in an uncomfortable direction.
My wife is very close with her older brother, who is also bi.
Bisexual.
And with whom we often speak very openly about sex and sexuality.
A few nights ago and after a few drinks, my wife got to talking fairly explicitly about some of the family role-playing that she and I are into.
And her brother, who I thought would be kind of horrified, was not only entirely supportive, but vaguely expressed interest in exploring this kink with us.
Exploring this kink, by the way, is a euphemism for having sex.
When we got home, I expected my wife to make it clear that her brother ever joining us in the bedroom was entirely off the table.
But instead, she seemed to think it was a really good idea.
In principle, I don't have a problem with this idea.
I've got to pause here for a second.
If, in principle, you don't have a problem with you and your wife having sex with her brother, you probably don't have very many principles.
You're probably not a very principled person.
If that is, in principle, you don't have a problem.
My wife and I have also enjoyed group sex.
Orgies.
And so that isn't the problem either.
I'm just worried about how this could affect my relationship with my brother-in-law.
Is there a way for me to make this happen without it getting weird?
It's weird.
It's weird, buddy.
Slate doesn't have much of an answer to it.
The advice columnist who responds says, well, look, if you're worried about how it's going to affect your relationship with your brother, then don't do it, basically.
That's all it says.
It doesn't explain, in principle, why this is a bad idea.
So, you'll notice what he says, right?
He says, I'm kind of uncomfortable with this.
This is a little weird.
And then he refers to the family role-playing that he and she are into.
But he just said he's not really into it.
He's just doing it to humor her.
Right?
He said, it's not my cup of tea, but then he says, I'm into it.
So he's obviously not the manliest man in the world.
He's obviously getting pushed around quite a lot here.
All of the reasoning for why not to sleep with your wife's brother is very...
It's just very subjective.
It's very, well, if it'll affect your relationship.
Well, if it'll make family dinners awkward.
Well, if it'll make family dinners sexual.
Well, if it, you know, okay, it might just, situationally, it might not work out great.
The reason not to have sex with your wife and her brother at the same time is because it's wrong.
It is morally wrong.
It is objectively wrong.
Wicked.
Not just a little bit creepy, it's actually wrong to do it.
It's a violation of the moral order on top of all the other gross aspects of it.
But we're not allowed to say that anymore because we're not allowed to say in this modern sexually liberated culture of anything goes and if it feels good, do it.
We're not allowed to say that certain sexual acts are intrinsically disordered.
This gets to the...
Big debate that's been going on on the right for months now.
It started with the porn thing.
Should we regulate porn?
And you had the kind of libertarian leaning people on the right say, no way!
If it doesn't hurt anybody, it doesn't matter.
If it feels good, do it.
And then you had the conservatives say, no, this is pretty bad.
It's an epidemic.
It's causing huge rises in ED. It's causing men to become perverted.
It's a big problem in the country and we don't want perverts running our country.
There is no...
There is no violation of the moral order that doesn't affect anybody, right?
There is no victimless crime, as they say.
All crimes have victims.
Even if you're the victim and the effects on other people are difficult to measure, but they can be measured.
Like, for instance, if I become a drug addict and kill myself, God forbid, you could say that's a victimless crime in that it's only affecting me.
But, of course, it affects many more people than you.
It affects your family.
It affects your friends.
It affects your community.
That is just what happens with these violations of the moral order.
You see it in Utah right now.
Utah just passed a bill to legalize polygamy.
Polygamy, much more understandable than having sex with your wife and her brother at the same time, but still a violation of our social and sexual mores today.
If it feels good, do it culture.
Why is polygamy wrong?
By the logic of Obergefell, the decision that redefined marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions.
By the logic of that Supreme Court decision, which discovered somewhere in the Constitution a right to intimacy.
Not sure where that was.
It's between the articles, I think.
By the logic of it.
Why should marriage not be redefined again to include polygamy?
Love is love.
If it feels good, do it.
It's not hurting anybody.
It's a victimless crime, right?
And yet we all know, yeah, there's something wrong about that.
We all know there's something wrong about sleeping with your wife and her brother at the same time.
But we've convinced ourselves in this very narrow, rationalistic way, this shallow way, that we cannot take seriously moral discussion, moral disagreement.
It all just has to be about us.
Well, it doesn't really hurt me.
It doesn't really affect me.
That's not a mature moral discussion.
It's not the discussion that our framers had.
It's not the discussion that any of our ancestors had who built this great civilization.
And if we don't start having that discussion again, we're not going to have the civilization for very long.
Okay, we've got to get to the mailbag running late as usual.
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Dailywire.com will be right back with the mailbag.
Mailbag.
Right back with the mailbag.
Dear master of covfefe and resident papist of the Daily Wire, I am a conservative and a Christian, and I believe in the differences of the sexes and that God made us to be different and to suit different roles.
I don't accept the nonsense put forward by the left that gender is separate from sex.
However, I experience gender dysphoria.
I know that this is a psychological problem and that I need to solve it.
But any therapist I approach will only give me affirmation therapy.
And I'm ashamed to approach my family, friends, or religious leaders.
And so I come to you, a social and political commentator who I only know on the internet.
What would you advise I do sincerely?
And may God bless you and yours.
Okay.
I'm very sorry to hear that you're going through that.
It's a very tough affliction, particularly because we don't know exactly how to treat it.
First of all, I would correct you a little bit here when you say, you've got to solve it.
It'd be nice if you could solve it.
It'd be nice if you could get rid of it, but that's not the way that afflictions always work.
Sometimes we just kind of bear suffering, and suffering sanctifies us spiritually, but it also shapes our character.
It also deepens our understanding of the world.
Everybody suffers, so you are not alone in suffering, though you do have this particular affliction.
You also have this problem, which is we live in a really dumb society right now where any psychologist you go to is not going to give you good psychological advice.
So here is my advice.
First of all, a little bit of encouragement.
I don't know how old you are, but when this gender dysphoria occurs, especially in young people...
Statistically, for the majority of people, it will go away over time.
Huge, I mean, 80 to 90% of teenagers who experience gender dysphoria, it just kind of goes away.
So that bit of advice could just be try to bear it out and hope that it goes away because statistically it very possibly will.
The next thing you should do, you say you're afraid to talk to your family about it.
I don't know your family situation.
That might be totally justified.
You don't want to talk to therapists because a lot of them are quacks.
Totally true.
You're afraid of talking to your religious leaders.
I don't know who your religious leaders are.
What I would recommend is you talk to my religious leaders, and that's because the Catholic Church has a nuanced view of this.
The Catholic Church, as with most things, has been thinking about it for 2,000 years, so there is a kind of nuanced view, and I think you would probably get...
Pretty good, balanced advice, even on what sort of psychologists to go seek out.
So I would recommend you talk to a Catholic priest about it.
Even if you are not Catholic yourself, I just think you're more likely, and with various other Protestant denominations, it might be more hit or miss just because there are so many different doctrines that are out there.
You know, I don't want to send you to the wrong people, even if there could be some good ones out there as well.
I would do that, and then I would do your best...
Actually, on the Catholic point, I would recommend finding a Catholic psychologist, or at least...
I say Catholic psychologist because Catholic psychologists will accept the natural law, so they won't push some wacky gender Gnostic ideology on you.
But if you find any psychologist who recognizes the natural law, then I think you'll be in a good place.
In the meantime, what you should do is...
Not lose heart.
Be encouraged.
Everybody is suffering.
You've got this particular affliction.
There are people out there who you can speak to about this.
There are people who are living with gender dysphoria or who regret going through sex affirmation surgery.
I interviewed one of them.
I forget his name.
Peter something.
When I was guest hosting Ben's radio show, I know Walt Heyer talks about this a lot.
He's another person who is...
Gone back and he regretted his surgery.
Those kind of voices are out there as well.
And I would recommend, just given my own knowledge of these religious leaders, I would recommend talking to a priest about it.
And just seeing, even if they don't give you religious advice that you like, if they can lead you to psychological advice.
Because there are resources out there.
And best of luck.
I will pray for you, my friend.
From Grant.
Hi, Michael.
I find a choir member in the church extremely attractive and she seems exceptionally sweet and genuine.
I want to ask her out but have no idea how to approach that.
Any tips on asking her out?
What could my opening line be?
I've never talked to her before but she has noticed me a couple times.
I'm extremely nervous and don't want to botch this.
Thank you for any advice.
Yes, I do have advice.
How about you open with a compliment?
This is now in our kind of ironic culture.
The idea of complimenting somebody is...
Unthinkable.
But how about you try that?
A real compliment.
Not flattery.
People hate flattery.
But actually, you know, hey, that was a lovely cantata you sang.
Oh, I really love this hymn.
Good choice.
Those sort of things, right?
And make it genuine.
Oh, lovely dress.
I mean, you know, it could be as simple as that.
And probably because men don't understand how to talk to women very much anymore, she will like that, especially if she's been noticing you.
She's probably looking for an opportunity to talk to you as well.
And then you can start a conversation.
And if you open with a compliment, it allows you to take the conversation somewhere that has some mutual interest.
So if you say, oh, I really loved how you sang How Great Thou Art, that hymn that you were singing on, Oh, thank you so much.
Yeah, I love How Great Thou Art.
Yeah, it's really good.
And then you can start talking about hymns, and then you'll have some common interest there, I assume, if you're both in the church choir.
And then you can bring it to the place where I'm sure you want to bring it to, which is, oh, wow, we certainly should discuss this further.
Do you want to get a drink after choir practice?
Or do you want to go to dinner after you want to grab a coffee or something?
That's where I would begin.
People always ask, how do I pick up a girl?
And The answer is so simple that people overlook it, which is be genuinely interested in them.
Be curious about what they have to say.
Like them.
They want to be around them.
And I think you'll probably have a good shot because it sounds to me like she's interested as well.
Okay, from John.
Dear Dr.
Covfefe slash Mr.
Swalwell, thank you for using both of my names.
Winner of the Good, thank you for using my title.
It seems to be generally abused by presidents.
Trump has used it relatively sparingly.
If you had your druthers, would you erase the pardon power altogether?
Huge fan of the show and your literary work.
Thank you very much.
I would not.
I love the pardon power.
I think it's great.
I think the founders and framers were smart to put it in the Constitution because it humanizes the government.
And after all, what is our government?
It's our fellow humans governing us.
So obviously, we are a nation of laws, not a nation of men.
We have this justice.
But justice without love, justice without mercy, is tyranny.
It's brittle.
It will crack.
And so you need a little safety valve in there.
And that safety valve is the pardon power.
I love that the executive, the spirited part of our government, has the ability to do that.
Some presidents abuse it.
Bill Clinton abused it.
Barack Obama certainly abused it as well.
But...
I don't think Trump is abusing it, and I would rather run the risk of presidents pardoning too many people than not have that ability at all.
All right.
That is our show.
We've got a lot more to get to, but, you know, of course.
We don't have time.
We run out of time every single week.
Tune back in on Monday.
By the way, I should announce I'm going to fly out next week to Washington, D.C. because Senator Ted Cruz and I will be doing a live verdict podcast at CPAC this year.
So if you're going to be at CPAC, we hope to see you there in the room.
If not, you know, go on out there.
Maybe we'll see you there and I'll see you on the East Coast.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Mike Bloomberg fell short at the debate last night after Pocahontas drew her tomahawk and cut him down to size.
