Coronavirus reaches the U.S. President Trump is playing it down, Democrats are playing it up, and no one can tell whether this is much ado about nothing or we’re all going to die. We will examine the mass media-generated hysteria. Then, speaking of not knowing whether you’re alive or dead, Joe Biden gets some good news from a new poll out in South Carolina, two different kinds of Republicans are voting for Bernie, and finally the Mailbag!
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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Coronavirus reaches the U.S. President Trump is playing it down.
Democrats are playing it up.
And no one can tell if this is much ado about nothing or if we're all going to die.
We will examine the mass media generated hysteria.
Then, speaking of not knowing whether you're alive or dead, Joe Biden's presidential campaign gets some good poll news out of South Carolina.
Two different kinds of Republicans are voting for Bernie Sanders.
And finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Coronavirus has reached the U.S.
We now have one confirmed case, and nobody knows what to think about this.
Is this the end of the world or is this not such a big deal?
The first case in the U.S. is in Solano County, California.
So that's in Northern California by San Francisco and Sacramento, that area.
The scary thing is we have no idea how this individual got coronavirus.
This person did not recently travel to a foreign country.
This person did not recently have contact with someone who is known to have had the virus.
So that is rightly freaking a lot of people out.
Plus, it's spreading around the world.
So you've got people under quarantine in New York.
You've got half of Italy's regions now infected by this.
The markets are tanking.
If you are invested in the stock market, this is not a very good day.
And so President Trump, first of all, is trying to assure everybody that everything is just fine.
He's trying to downplay all of this.
Now, obviously that's what he would do.
The question is, is it real or is it not?
Is this a huge deal?
Is this not a huge deal?
President Trump says that the reason everybody's freaking out is because the Democrats are exploiting this and creating a panic for political advantage.
What's your response to Speaker Pelosi who said earlier today, you don't know what you're talking about, about the coronavirus.
I'm also wondering if you'd want to address critics who can't be trusted about what your administration is saying.
Sure.
I think Speaker Pelosi's incompetent.
She lost to Congress once.
I think she's going to lose it again.
She lifted my poll numbers up 10 points.
I never thought I would see that so quickly and so easily.
I'm leading everybody.
We're doing great.
I don't want to do it that way.
It's almost unfair if you think about it.
But I think she's incompetent, and I think she's not thinking about the country.
And instead of making a statement like that, Where I've been beating her routinely at everything.
Instead of making a statement like that, she should be saying we have to work together because we have a big problem potentially.
And maybe it's going to be a very little problem.
I hope that it's going to be a very little problem.
She's trying to create a panic.
And there's no reason to panic because we have done so good.
All they're trying to do is get a political advantage.
This isn't about political advantage.
We're all trying to do the right thing.
I love that President Trump takes about 40 solid seconds of just insulting Nancy Pelosi before he gets to the actual question of whether coronavirus is a huge deal.
Still, I tend to agree with what President Trump is saying here, that the Democrats and the mainstream media, but I repeat myself, are using this as an opportunity to create a panic for political advantage.
I say this without looking at any of the science, without looking at any of the studies, or at least not very many of the studies about this.
I say this simply because of the hysterical response that we've seen from the left and A great example of this is in that same press conference where President Trump goes out there.
He says he's going to address the coronavirus issue.
He says that he's now appointing a task force.
The task force is going to be run by no less an authority than the vice president of the United States.
So it shows he's really taking this seriously.
And...
The left pillories him for it.
Immediately, blue checkmark Twitter actually accused Mike Pence of spreading HIV. Here's President Trump's announcement.
When Mike was Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, they've established great health care.
They have a great system there, a system that a lot of the other states have really looked to and changed their systems.
They wanted to base it on the Indiana system.
He's very good.
And I think, and he's really very expert at the field.
And what I've done is I'm going to be announcing exactly right now that I'm going to be putting our vice president, Mike Pence, in charge.
Okay, a perfectly fine statement to make is obviously doing that to show that the administration is taking this seriously.
And the left, I kid you not, Is freaking out because they say Mike Pence spread HIV and AIDS throughout all of Indiana.
How are they even making that argument?
We'll get to that in a second.
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How on earth can you accuse Mike Pence of spreading AIDS throughout Indiana?
How do you take the most kind of basic statement of, hey, look, we're taking this really seriously.
The vice president is going to be overseeing it.
How do you take that into, we're going to spread coronavirus like Mike Pence spread AIDS? So they got this idea.
They got this argument.
By twisting a vote, by twisting a political position so beyond anything that's recognizable that all you can do is laugh at them.
Mike Pence, when he was governor of Indiana, opposed a very liberal and stupid policy called needle exchanges.
Needle exchanges are when you encourage heroin addicts to shoot up more drugs because you give them the needles so that they can shoot them up.
This has been tried in a lot of cities around America.
It always spreads disease.
It always spreads crime.
It increases addiction.
addiction.
It's disgusting.
I mean, the reason that you, when you're walking around certain cities like San Francisco, for instance, and you see needles on the street, it's because the government is just giving them to junkies.
It's a horrible, horrible, indefensible policy, right?
So Mike Pence, like most other conservatives says, yeah, it's a pretty bad policy.
I'm not going to support that.
And what the left did is they said, okay, well, if you don't support giving needles to junkies, then you are personally responsible for the opioid crisis.
You're responsible for heroin addicts shooting up.
And when they share needles, if one of them has HIV and it goes to the other one, you are responsible for that.
Next, they're going to accuse him of killing Freddie Mercury.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
And yet, that is the degree of mass hysteria, mass media hysteria, that the left and the blue check marks and the usual suspects are willing to go to.
Next, in this press conference, already I'm pretty skeptical of the left here because they're willing to twist anything.
Next, President Trump is asked why he's treating coronavirus differently than he felt Ebola should have been treated in 2014.
You also said it was a quote-unquote total joke to appoint someone to lead the Ebola response with, quote, zero experience in the medical field.
Now you've appointed Mike Pence.
They listened to a lot of what I had to say.
I did.
So how does that square with what you're doing now?
They listened to a lot, well, because it's a much different problem than Ebola.
Ebola, you disintegrated, especially at the beginning.
They've made a lot of progress now in Ebola.
But with Ebola, we were talking about it before.
You disintegrated.
You got Ebola.
That was it.
This one is different, much different.
This is a flu.
This is like a flu.
And this is a much different situation than Ebola.
He's right.
It is different.
I mean, the imagery that Trump uses is often so vivid that it creates sort of disturbing images in your mind.
But it's true with Ebola.
You did disintegrate.
You did melt, basically.
I mean, it was a truly horrifying condition.
With coronavirus, it's different.
Coronavirus is more like a flu.
I mean, it's obviously got a significantly higher mortality rate, but still, right now, according to all the experts, the mortality rate is about 2%.
Not good, but a lot better than 98%, right?
Coronavirus is related to other similar viruses that we've seen.
Do you remember the SARS epidemic?
It's related to SARS. Again, not a good thing, but the whole world survived.
That 2% mortality rate, by the way, is using data from the epicenter of this epidemic at mainland China.
So, look, it's obviously very different than Ebola.
You've got to ask yourself, when you want to judge whether this is a panic created for political advantage, or really we're all going to die, or, you know, it's something in the middle, what could President Trump have said or done that would have made the left happy?
What could he have possibly said or done in that press conference that wouldn't have been twisted as the end of the world?
Who could he have appointed?
They're all upset that he appointed Mike Pence, because Mike Pence, I guess, is the cause of AIDS or something, whatever the left is saying today.
Let's say he appointed someone with medical experience.
Let's say he appointed Ben Carson.
Ben Carson, one of the most celebrated, renowned surgeons in the United States.
First guy to successfully separate conjoined twins who were conjoined at the head.
If they had appointed Ben Carson, can you just imagine the headlines today mocking Ben?
I mean, you don't need to imagine it.
You can remember the 2016 race when they called him an idiot, when they called him a sellout, when they called him ignorant, right?
They can do that to a major medical figure in the United States.
They're going to do it to anybody.
What if President Trump shut down the airports?
Can you imagine the racism?
Well, one time he did block people from coming in who were in very dangerous countries, countries with a high terrorism problem, and he was pilloried as a racist, a monster, a bigot.
They're still talking about it on the campaign trail.
What if President Trump had shut down the border?
He said, we've got a global pandemic.
We're going to stop people who might be infected from coming in here.
Well, I'll tell you how the left would have reacted because Elizabeth Warren already used this point and she used it to make the dumbest political argument that I've heard from the Democratic presidential field in, I don't know, 24 hours or something.
Obviously, there's not huge timescales here.
We'll get to that in a second.
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If Trump had done anything, if he had said anything, if he had appointed anybody, the left would be freaking out and saying it was the worst thing he could have done.
One obvious thing President Trump could do, which he's been trying to do since 2016, is get control of the border.
Get control of who enters and exits the United States.
Figure out, and more importantly, figure out who's coming into the United States.
The reason that we need to be able to get control of the border is exemplified when you've got a global pandemic like this.
So what's the argument the Democrats are making?
Elizabeth Warren at a town hall that apparently happened last night on CNN. Nobody watched it.
Nobody paid attention.
We just can't take that much of them.
She said that the first thing she would do as president would be to take all the money that President Trump is spending on border security and put it toward researching coronavirus.
I'm going to be introducing a plan tomorrow to take every dime that the president is now spending on his racist wall at our southern border and divert it to work on the coronavirus.
Great idea, Liz.
That's what you want.
When you've got a global pandemic going on, the first thing you want to do is open up all the borders and have no idea who's coming into your country.
Brilliant.
That's the kind of Harvard education that we need to get into the White House.
This is a major problem.
I don't know if coronavirus is a major problem.
It might be.
It might not be.
As of right now, it's very unclear.
The major problem is that we can't trust the media to tell us.
We do not know right now if coronavirus is the second coming or a later coming of the bubonic plague or if it's just like the seasonal flu or cold or something.
We don't know that because our press is so corrupt.
Our press is so blindly opposed to this president that we cannot trust them to blow up something which is not a big deal into a global panic, to send markets tanking all because they hate this president.
I mean, we've seen this time and time again.
James O'Keefe from Project Veritas just busted an ABC reporter For admitting that he's a socialist, right?
He was caught on hidden tape.
He said, oh yeah, I'm a total socialist.
I'm not even a democratic socialist.
I'm just a full-on socialist.
We've known this.
There's nothing really shocking about that kind of a report.
We've known that about the press for years.
But then they admit it, and you think, oh, that's right, they all have this political bias, and some are better at hiding it than others.
CNN's Jim Acosta demonstrated this principle just the other day when he flat-out insulted the president at a news conference.
Just wanted to follow up on my colleague's question about Russian interference.
Can you pledge to the American people that you will not accept any foreign assistance in the upcoming election?
And on this idea of a purge in your administration, there was recently the departure of your acting DNI, Joseph McGuire.
You replaced him with your ambassador to Germany, Rick Grinnell.
Some of your critics have pointed out that Ambassador Grinnell Has no intelligence experience.
How can you justify to the American people having an acting DNI with no intelligence experience?
Okay.
Okay.
Excuse me.
First of all here.
So he asks a fair question, right?
By CNN standards, a fair question.
I'm not saying it's a totally fair question, but you've got this guy, Richard Grinnell, who is a former ambassador to Germany.
He was, I think, the longest serving spokesman ever at the UN. And then he's in this acting position as the top spy.
Then President Trump turns it, right, to reveal, hold on, this isn't a fair question.
You're not coming from a place of good faith.
He turns the question, he puts it back on Acosta.
No help from any country.
And I haven't been given help from any country.
And if you see what CNN, your wonderful network, said, I guess they apologized in a way for, didn't they apologize for the fact that they said certain things that weren't true?
Tell me, what was their apology yesterday?
What did they say?
Okay, so you see what Trump does here.
Trump knows that there's no win by explaining why his acting DNI is a real cool guy.
There's no win.
Any way he does it, he's on the defensive.
Acosta has set up this sort of unfair situation where Trump's got to defend a guy who's got an unimpeachable resume.
So...
Trump turns it on Acosta, but he's using very nice language.
He's using very diplomatic language.
He says, oh, you know, you, it's your wonderful network.
You know what you guys always do to me.
And he's needling Acosta, and he's pushing Acosta to answer a question, and Acosta takes the bait.
Mr.
President, I think our record on delivering the truth is a lot better than yours sometimes, if you don't mind me saying.
Let me tell you about your record.
Your record is so bad, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
I'm not ashamed of anything, and our organization is not ashamed of yourself.
As far as McGuire is concerned, he's a terrific guy, but you know, on March 11th his time ended anyway, so his time came up.
So we would have had to, by statute, we would have had to change him anyway.
Will your new DNI have experience in the intelligence field?
Yes, yes.
In fact, we're talking to five different people right now.
I think all people that you know, all people that you respect, and I'll make a decision probably over the next week to two weeks.
We have some very good people.
Oh, look at that masterful exchange.
Did you see what he did there?
So he needles him, he's pushing him, he's pushing him, and then Jim Acosta completely takes the bait and shows his cards.
Trump was provoking Jim Acosta here.
He was trying to get Jim Acosta to show his corruption and bias.
But then Jim Acosta did it, right?
No matter what the president says, no matter what the politician that you're interviewing says, it is absolutely not the role of the reporter to start insulting the politician.
Actually, we have a much better record on truth than you do, you idiot.
You dumb idiot.
I hate you.
I hate you, Mr.
President.
It's so pathetic.
Chris Wallace at Fox News, who I believe is a Democrat, he said off the record, this has been reported in some of the press, that he was so embarrassed by that answer.
I mean, what a humiliating answer for the journalistic profession from Jim Acosta there to just start insulting the president.
Wow.
But we know this, right?
So what President Trump does, starts out, it's a sort of fair question.
Then Jim Acosta reveals that he's just an anti-Trump operative.
And then at the end, you saw President Trump turns it again and starts giving a real answer.
He says, no, you know, look, but we're going to interview some good people.
We got all people I think you're really going to like.
So on the bookends, the beginning and the end of Trump's performance look really good.
And in the middle, what President Trump did was get the press to reveal how much they hate him.
That tarnishes their credibility.
And it's their fault that they're doing it.
They're the ones giving up their credibility.
So now we can't even know if we're all going to die from coronavirus or if it's really no big deal.
Moving on to the 2020 race.
We also don't really know what's going on there because we're getting a lot of conflicting polls.
Joe Biden, we thought, was down and at him.
He's pretty much just muttering to himself on stage at the last debate.
And yet, all hope might not be lost for Joe because there is a new poll that's come out from Clemson.
There's a poll that came out yesterday.
Joe Biden, according to this poll, has an 18-point lead in South Carolina.
The numbers are Biden, 35 percent.
Steyer, 17 percent.
You forgot that guy was even in the race.
Sanders, 13 percent.
Warren and Buttigieg, 8 percent.
Plobuchar, 4%.
That is a very sizable lead for Joe Biden, which means that Biden actually might be back in this race.
On top of that, Mike Bloomberg is stalling.
So right now, after his very poor debate performances, it looks as though his national polls have stalled out or they've actually begun to reverse themselves.
In California right now, Bloomberg is back down at 11%.
In Super Tuesday states, he's down.
He's in the teens and he's in the low 20s.
That's not enough to take him to the nomination.
So Biden might have the moderate lane.
This is causing a lot of Republicans to vote for Bernie Sanders.
And I don't mean they're just rooting for Bernie Sanders.
I mean they are going out in the open primaries where Republicans can vote for Democrats and voting for Bernie Sanders.
There was actually a video that was leaked from some Trump supporters that came out yesterday.
The Never Trump Republicans are all upset about this.
This came out yesterday where these mischievous Republicans were arguing for all of their fellow Republicans to go out and vote for Bernie in the nomination so that Trump can clobber him in November.
Are you a supporter of President Trump?
Are you a registered voter in South Carolina?
Hi, I'm Karen with the Spartanburg Tea Party.
And I'm Stacy, a grassroots activist.
South Carolina Republicans have waited since 2016 to vote again for President Trump.
With no Republican primary in South Carolina, voters will have to wait until November to cast a vote for our president.
But there's still a way South Carolina Republicans can support President Trump.
Even after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, Joe Biden is still the favorite in South Carolina.
We all know that the DNC and the Democrat establishment do not want the independent senator from Vermont as their nominee.
We're asking South Carolina Republicans to show their support for President Trump by crossing over and voting in the Democratic primary for Senator Bernie Sanders.
We feel this may help move the needle in closing our primaries in South Carolina.
Help us help President Trump by going to your polling location on Saturday, February 29th and voting for independent Bernie Sanders to be the Democrat nominee.
What have I been telling you?
I've been telling you to do exactly the same thing, and I'm so glad that they are backing me up on this.
Some of the never-Trump Republicans, Bill Kristol in particular was posting this around, were saying that this is terrible, nefarious, it's a smoking gun.
This is perfectly legal.
This isn't violating any laws.
People do this all the time.
Whether or not it actually affects elections, I'm a little more skeptical of that.
It's hard enough to get people to come out and vote for their own party to get them to go re-register, go show up to another primary.
I don't think it actually works that much, but I understand why these Republicans want Bernie to get the nomination, because I do think increasingly it's likely that Trump will sweep them all.
Now, if the economy totally tanks, I guess it's anybody's ballgame.
So there is some risk, especially as coronavirus is going around.
But even so, I don't think that America is ready to vote for a very elderly socialist.
So that's the one kind of Republican that is voting for Bernie Sanders.
There is another kind of Republican voting for Bernie Sanders.
And if you think that the logic of those Tea Party activists is a little kooky, just wait until you hear the illogic of the never Trump Republicans.
There is an op-ed right now in the Washington Post by Joe Walsh.
I know Joe Walsh.
He's always been nice to me.
I've interviewed him on the radio.
But Joe Walsh has lost it a little bit.
He's gone off the deep end.
He was a major...
He actually supported Trump in 2016.
Then he became sort of the never-Trump Republican.
He ran for president.
He just dropped out.
Joe Walsh writes this piece, quote, I'm no fan of Bernie Sanders, but never Trump means never Trump.
Sorry, GOP outcasts, but sometimes Trump just doesn't cut it.
Now, Joe, I actually want to read right below the byline.
It says, Joe Walsh is a former Illinois congressman and the author of F, they spell it all out, silence, calling Trump out for the cultish, moronic, authoritarian con man he is.
I love that.
They say, I hate that this effing Trump is so effing vulgar.
I hate that he's such a name-calling moron jerk.
You're sort of doing the things you're accusing him of doing.
But anyway, this is his logic.
And it shows you the moral error that is at the heart, not just of Never Trump, but of any political position that backs you into an untenable corner.
He writes, quote, This isn't complicated.
Never Trump...
Has always been a straightforward concept.
The word never is right there in the name.
But with Senator Bernie Sanders moving ahead of the pack as the clear frontrunner in this year's Democratic presidential primaries, some of my Republican and ex-Republican brethren have started implying that what never Trump actually meant was something more like, fingers crossed, I really, really hope not Trump, but I guess sometimes Trump, if Democrats wind up nominating a self-described Democratic socialist.
But that's not how it works.
When I finally came around to saying never Trump, I meant it.
Never Trump means that you still believe in the Constitution.
It means you knew what Benjamin Franklin meant when he warned that we Americans have been blessed with a republic if you can keep it.
It means you recognize that Trump is enough of a threat to our founding principles that you won't vote for him under any circumstances.
And, at least to me, it also means you'll suck it up and support his Democrat opponent no matter who that is.
No.
Do you know what it means?
It means you made a mistake and you're too prideful to admit it.
That's what never Trump means today.
I'm not saying that's what never Trump meant in 2016.
There were a lot of open questions about President Trump.
But today, never Trump means that you made a mistake, you made a miscalculation, circumstances were not as you predicted and they actually worked out pretty well, but you have too much pride to admit that you were wrong.
Never Trump means you still believe in the Constitution.
First of all, the Never Trump forces have been consistently undermining the Constitution since before the 2016 election to try to get that guy removed from office extra-constitutionally.
Benjamin Franklin warned Americans.
Do you think that Benjamin Franklin would prefer an America-hating, America-blaming socialist like Bernie Sanders over Donald Trump?
What, because Donald Trump has sort of boorish behavior?
Have you ever read about Benjamin Franklin?
Do you know how that man behaved?
Have you read his autobiography?
He's a little bit of a libertine sometimes, okay?
Come on.
It means you won't vote under any circumstances.
It means you'll vote for a socialist.
I guess that is what it means.
He actually says it right here in the article.
I hate to break it to you, but if you're really never Trump, then you know there's no except if he's a socialist footnote.
So then what's it about?
Because I thought the good argument for not voting for Trump if you're a conservative in 2016 was that you thought he would be more left-wing than Hillary Clinton.
Was that a convincing argument?
No.
But...
There was a possibility there.
He had donated to a lot of Democrats.
He had described himself as very, very pro-choice.
There was a real fear that he was this left-wing guy and that if you had a left-wing guy take over the Republican Party, that would be very bad and so we don't want to do that.
Okay, I get that argument.
It's something to it.
But if the only argument for Never Trump is that you don't like the mean tweets, you think he doesn't talk right, you think he's a little too boorish, and then you're willing to vote for a socialist instead, you have completely lost the narrative.
You have completely lost the point of politics.
It has just become for you.
About manners, about a kind of performance, but it's not about the real substantive issues underneath.
Trump has been the most conservative president, not only in my lifetime, probably the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge.
It's pretty good.
Can't you take a win?
If you're willing to vote for a socialist over that, were you ever a conservative in the first place?
Maybe you were, but certainly what has happened to you is you have been so warped by pride that your view of politics is now utterly unreliable.
Look, just very quickly, before we get to the mailbag, there was a progressive think tank's analysis that just came out over Bernie's plans.
It's actually called the Progressive Policy Institute.
Bernie's plans would cost over 10 years.
Do you know how much?
$50 trillion with a T. The federal budget is $4.5 trillion each year.
This would double the size of the government, of the federal government.
It would cost $15 trillion more over 10 years than the next most radical candidate, which is Elizabeth Warren.
And it would cost $42 trillion more than the third most expensive Democratic candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Now, I actually don't think that kind of accounting matters all that much, because I think for most people, you hear a big number and you say, all big numbers are the same.
Yeah, it's a really, really big number.
It's something that ends in an ilion, right?
It's bean counting.
You don't win arguments from bean counting, especially not to beat a guy like Bernie Sanders, who's making moral arguments.
You've got to make the moral arguments yourself.
Elizabeth Warren made this mistake the other night.
She said, look, I love Bernie's policies, but I'm going to implement them better.
I'll implement them more efficiently.
Nobody votes for efficiency.
Nobody votes for a better manager.
That doesn't rouse you and send you to the polls.
We're voting for a cause.
We're voting for a vision.
The argument against socialism has to be moral.
And if you're just making arguments from bean counting or efficiency, if you're making arguments because of how you don't like the guy's tweets, you've lost the narrative, and you need to get serious.
We need to get serious, too, into this mailbag.
But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
First, before we go, go buy Matt Walsh's book, Church of Cowards.
Very important book right now.
You've got Christians being martyred in the Middle East.
You've got Christians in America who aren't even willing to voice their opinion because they're afraid of not getting invited to a few parties or something.
Church of Cowards, go get it.
You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere that you get fine, fine conservative books.
Super Tuesday, leave that night open.
We will be with you smoking stogies, drinking too much whiskey, and following the results all night.
We'll be there.
Set your clock for many, many hours.
We're going to be doing all of that.
And then, by the way, on Leap Day, which comes around once every four years, head over to The Daily Wire.
We have got a very, very special deal coming for you.
So you're not going to want to miss that because if you miss it, it's going to take another four years.
And by then, I think global warming will have done us in.
There will be a lot of world problems.
So make sure you get it now.
Dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
First question from Golda.
Dear Mr. Knowles, what is the difference between love and infatuation?
How can I tell if he's the one?
Thank you.
What a brilliant question.
This is something that people no longer understand because we use stupid slogans like love is love as though that tells us anything about politics or love or philosophy or ourselves.
There is a big difference between love and infatuation.
Infatuation, another term for that would be sentimentality.
It's like that real sugary, Hallmark-Cardy kind of love, but it's not really love.
Infatuation is all about you.
Love is all about the other person.
So we all knew this person when we were in school.
There was a girl who just always needed to have a boyfriend.
And whatever boyfriend she had was always like the greatest guy in the world.
And he had all the greatest qualities.
And he was just like a hero.
He was a god.
And then they would break up and she'd get a new boyfriend.
And then the new boyfriend was exactly the same thing.
It's because with infatuation, what you are doing is you are really in love with the idea of being in love.
You are really in love with an ideal that you have created in your own mind of the perfect person.
And then whether or not the person in reality matches up to that person, you are superimposing all of those ideals onto the person.
So it's a totally circular thing.
You are simply in love with your own self-generated idea.
Love, true love, is willing the good of the other person.
So true love is warts and all.
True love is staring the other person in the face, seeing them for who they are in reality and loving that person anyway.
Or maybe because of that.
Big difference.
Make sure that you are...
You're really loving the other person, and it's not just the images that you're putting on that person.
And one way to know that, to know the difference, is to analyze other relationships that you've had.
If they've all had the same kind of character, if you've all kind of viewed the person in exactly the same way, you might be dealing with infatuation.
But if you really like the other guy, then it's probably love.
From Eric.
The excellent Michael Knowles.
One theme of your show is how the modern left rejects the concept of objective morality.
I've noticed that one's rejection of objective morality quickly follows their rejection of God.
So my question for you is, can one believe in objective morality without believing in God?
Moreover, how can we as conservatives argue for objective morality without tracing said morality back to God?
Thanks.
One can believe in objective morality without God, it's just that one would be wrong.
You know, we believe all sorts of things that don't make a whole lot of sense, and so you can do that, but it doesn't make any sense.
There cannot be objective morality without God.
Actually, one of the arguments for God's existence is the argument from morality.
Very simply, if morality is objective and absolute, which is what we mean when we say morality or objective morality, Then God must exist.
Now, there are a couple ways this can go.
If you're an atheist, a great many atheists are materialists.
So they'd say, everything that we talk about that really matters to us, love, hopes, dreams, joy, they're all an illusion.
They're all just something we're fooling ourselves with.
All that really exists is flesh and bones, and we've got chemicals firing off in our brains, and that's what's giving us this impression of a metaphysical material.
If that's the kind of atheism we're talking about, then morality can't exist at all, because morality is not a physical thing.
You can't hold onto it and touch it.
It's a metaphysical thing.
So that doesn't work.
Now, if you're the sort of atheist who says, you know, hey man, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual, or something like that, some kind of vague notion of spirituality, which usually just means, I'm not that interested in God, but I'm really interested in myself.
If you've got that kind of idea, okay, listen, I don't mean to Make fun of this.
I actually held that view myself once when I was a teenager.
But if you have that idea, then I guess amorality could exist.
Like the idea that through evolution, human beings have for some reason developed these highly sophisticated systems of morality, which often encourage us to sacrifice ourselves, which doesn't seem to bode very well for evolution, but it's evolved somehow, and anyway, it's always changing because humans are always evolving.
That is amorality, but that is not an objective, absolute morality, right?
Because it's always changing.
It's always constructed by human beings.
If we all came together and came up with a different idea, then that would be the morality.
If you want the objective, absolute morality, which is all anybody is referring to when we use that term, God must exist.
And that's a wonderful thing.
From Matt.
Hey Michael, who is fact-checking these debate moderators?
I feel like there was a lot of misinformation directed into the questions.
The one that stood out to me was the African Americans earning 73 cents on the dollar compared to white American statistic.
Where is the evidence to support this?
These moderators present the candidates, these statistics, and the candidates present these statistics as facts, and that's wrong.
Thanks.
That statistic, the 73 cents on the dollar that black Americans earn compared to white Americans, I looked this one up, and it is a real statistic.
It comes from Pew Research.
You see it posted around from fairly reputable sources.
The problem with the moderators and the candidates is not that they're presenting these statistics.
The problem is they're not explaining these statistics.
So they present the statistics without context, and then they use that to imply that the reason that there's this wage gap is because of systemic racism, institutionalized racism, But that isn't the case.
The reason that there's that wage gap is not explained primarily by race.
It's explained primarily by education and experience in the workforce.
The race is not the primary factor.
It's not really much of a factor at all.
The real factor here is you've got different educational attainment, you've got different schools, you've got different time in the workforce, you've got different caliber of work.
You know, different companies.
And so when you wash all of that out, if you look at it primarily through the lens of race, there's this wage gap, but it's not evidence of racism.
It's the same thing with the gender wage gap.
There's a similar wage gap between men and women, men of all races and women of all races.
And they say women earn 75 cents on the dollar that men do, which is true until you correct for education and time in the workforce.
When you correct for that, just like the racial wage gap, the wage gap disappears.
Now, obviously, the Democrats are not going to present that context because they want to race hustle and sex hustle to try to divide Americans and get their votes.
And the moderators are not going to correct them on it because the moderators are Democrats, too.
From Sarah.
Dear most revered and austere religious podcaster, I love your shows and have two questions.
Thank you very much.
First, what are you listening to in your earpiece during the Michael Knowles show?
Secondly, what do you and Ted Cruz talk about on Verdict when the cameras and microphones aren't recording?
Thanks.
So in my earpiece during the show, I'm listening to Hall& Oates.
And when I'm speaking to Ted Cruz during Verdict and the cameras are off and the microphones are off, we're talking about what's really going on at Area 51.
And I wish that I could tell you.
But if I told you, I would have to kill you.
From Grant.
Hi, Michael.
I recently finished a bunch of C.S. Lewis' works, Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, and The Great Divorce, and I'm currently reading Chesterton's Orthodoxy.
After this, I'm looking to delve into Dante's Divine Comedy.
What a great reading list you've got.
However, I'm not sure which translation of Dante to pick up.
Do you have a recommendation?
Thank you.
Cheers to 500 more episodes.
I would recommend, and I'm only giving this out secondhand, the John Charty translation.
I have not read a translation of it because when I was growing up, for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to learn Italian, which is possibly the least practically useful language in the world.
So I didn't learn Spanish.
I didn't learn a language that could actually get me around, you know, day to day.
But I did learn Italian.
So that's how I read Dante.
But I would recommend the Charty because friends of mine who have Hello, Mr.
Knowles.
The more science and medicine progresses, the more we realize our thoughts and sometimes our actions are a function of hormones and our body's chemical processes.
I know we have the ability to overcome these chemicals and hormones, but I can't quite wrap my brain around reconciling that with the idea of free will.
Thanks, and don't let Ben push you out.
You're the real star there.
Thank you very much.
Wow, listen to what you wrote, though, in that question.
The question that you wrote actually kind of gives away the misunderstanding here.
You said, I can't quite wrap my brain around it.
Now, the usual phrase is, I can't quite wrap my mind around it.
And the difference is the brain is a physical organ, and the mind is your sort of intellectual, metaphysical thing.
But what you're saying is, yeah, I'm kind of doubting that the metaphysical exists.
I think we're all just a product of our chemicals.
I just kind of reject the premise here.
I don't think that medical science shows us that our choices are merely or primarily the effect of physical processes that are going on.
Here's how I know this.
If you've ever learned anything at all, you know that learning is not the effect of merely physical processes.
So the biggest transformations that we could possibly undergo in our minds or our brains, I guess, is learning, right, or changing your mind, right?
So you've got one idea and then something new happens and you change it.
And that could be radical.
I mean, it can have major effects on how you live your life.
If you're a real decadent guy and you're going out to the strip club every night and getting bottle service and then you change your mind, you read a book, you read the Bible, and you say, oh, my gosh, I've got to go become a monk in the hills.
You have just on a very physical level completely changed the way that your life is going to go.
But it wasn't caused by a physical process.
It was caused by an intellectual and metaphysical process.
You've read something.
You've taken in that information.
That has led to physical changes.
The reason people get confused about this is because the only thing we can see is the physical.
So they're confusing correlation for causation.
They're saying, because I can see that there's a physical change here, the physical has to be the cause of it.
But actually, we are not merely our bodies, and we're also not merely our spirits.
That's another ancient heresy that was condemned a long time ago.
This idea that the body is evil and it's fake, it's actually coming back now in the form of transgenderism, which tells you that your body has no bearing on who you are, and really you're just a You're a secret, invisible being, and you've got to change your body to get in line with that.
Actually, we're both.
We're body and soul.
We're mind, spirit, right?
We're all in this one human unity, and we do have free will.
It's not something that you can see, but you can't see most of the things that matter in your life.
All right.
Let's get to the last question here.
From Ryan.
Dear Michael, what would you recommend for my first cigar?
Thanks.
P.S. I miss getting episodes of Another Kingdom.
Thanks for bringing that work to life.
Very important question.
Very important question.
The first cigar.
My first cigar was a Cuban cigar.
It was given to me by a friend.
If I were you, you're around here, I would start out with something like the Oliva Series O or the Cusano 18.
Or it's a cigar that are a little bit more mild, kind of get you into it, and then you can graduate to more intense flavor profiles.
All right, that's our show.
We have so much more to get to, but I can't because I've got to run over to CPAC. CPAC is going on right now in Washington, D.C. That's why I'm broadcasting from this hotel room, because Senator Ted Cruz and I are going to be doing an episode of Verdict live at CPAC with the chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, of the Republican National Committee.
It's going to be a whole lot of fun.
We've got more surprises coming up there.
So if you're in D.C., head on over and say hello.
Otherwise, I'll see you next week.
I'm Michael Knowles.
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