The Trump bucks are here! Coronavirus stimulus checks hit people’s bank accounts yesterday, giving much-needed relief to millions of Americans, and the mainstream media are furious about it. But are left-wing journalists angry about the policy, or are they just upset that President Trump is getting all the credit? Then, liberal governors give us even more evidence that the coronavirus pandemic is politically a thing of the past, the government power grab leaves victims dead in its wake, and, speaking of criminals, a new report alleges that Jussie Smollett had sex with his attacker, which is particularly awkward since Jussie Smollett attacked himself. We’ll take a broad look at love in the time of self-isolation.
Check out The Cold War: What We Saw, a new podcast written and presented by Bill Whittle at https://bit.ly/2z2j1NB. 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 stimulus checks hit people's bank accounts yesterday, giving much-needed relief to millions of Americans, and the mainstream media are furious about it.
But are left-wing journalists angry about the policy, or are they just upset that President Trump is getting all the credit?
Then, liberal governors give us even more evidence.
That the coronavirus pandemic is politically a thing of the past.
The government power grab leaves victims dead in its wake.
And, speaking of criminals, a new report alleges that Jussie Smollett had sex with his attacker, which is particularly awkward because Jussie Smollett attacked himself.
We will take a broad look at love in the time of self-isolation.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
How are you going to spend your Trump bucks?
The money hit everybody's bank account yesterday.
The money printer goes burr, and we're hopefully all going to stimulate the economy.
The strategy here behind the Trump bucks is driving the mainstream media and the left crazy, and it's driving them crazy because he's stealing their usual strategy and using it against them.
So, we'll get to that in one second.
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The Trump bucks hit the bank account and the left are really upset.
Now, why are they going to even be able to justify how upset they are?
They can't actually come out and say, we're upset that Americans are getting relief after the government mandated that they all stop working for two months.
So, the way they've got to express their frustration is to hone in on this one fact of the stimulus, which is that President Trump's name is on it.
Here's a reporter asking that very question.
Why did you have your name added to these coronavirus relief checks?
Well, I don't know too much about it, but I understand my name is there.
I don't know where they're going, how they're going.
I do understand it's not delaying anything, and I'm satisfied with that.
I don't imagine it's a big deal.
I'm sure people will be very happy to get a big, fat, beautiful check, and my name is on it.
Yeah, go ahead, please.
Go ahead, please.
Please.
Go ahead.
A big, fat, beautiful check, and my name is on it.
Trump here is stealing a left-wing political tactic.
Right?
The left, the left is really good at optics, usually.
They're very good at making it seem like they are the ones giving you all these things, all this money, all these rights, all they just give, give, give, and they put their name on it.
Now, usually it's not the case that they're giving you anything.
They're just taking your tax money and then giving it right back to you and saying it's theirs.
The left has long done this.
Now President Trump is using that same tactic at a time when Americans actually do need relief.
But he's flipping their tactic even in this negotiation.
Don't forget, originally, this is a federal program.
The Congress and the Senate pass it.
So it happens at the federal level.
President Trump is running the federal government.
The only way that Democrats would agree to the relief package for coronavirus is if, even though the money came from the federal government, if the states administered it.
Now, at the time, a lot of people wondered, who cares?
Why would you want to slow down the process of getting money to people who need it in this time of unemployment?
It doesn't make any sense, does it?
The federal government can fund it to you just as easily as the states can.
But the reason for that is that the Democrats did not want Trump to get the credit, even though it was a Trump program, even though it was federally funded.
So they went through this whole strabats just so that they could avoid giving Trump the credit.
And what did Trump do?
He flipped it back on them and he signed the checks.
Really smart play.
He, once again, stymied their tactics.
And, of course, people are not going to get the check and say, hmm, I really want to cash this $1,200.
I really want to pay off my bills.
I really want to pay my rent this month.
It's got Trump's name on it.
I can't cash it.
No, it's just going to remind them that this came from the federal level and give Trump the credit that he deserves.
Stymies them on that.
And then Trump turns his attention to the Congress.
Because right now, there are a lot of open positions in the federal government.
And We're good to go.
If the Congress and the Senate do adjourn, then President Trump can appoint people through what's called a recess appointment.
If they don't adjourn, then those people need confirmation.
And right now, they're in this middle ground where they haven't technically adjourned, but they're not there, so nothing can get done.
Those positions can't be filled, and obviously we're in the midst of a crisis.
So it's more important than ever to get those positions filled.
President Trump figured out a way to circumnavigate this issue that managed to make everybody's heads explode.
He threatened to adjourn himself, both houses of Congress.
Here's a live feed of President Trump threatening to close down both houses of Congress.
Talk of the exclusion of the Duke of York from the rightful succession is treason.
Any who speak of it set themselves against legitimate authority and are the heirs in spirit to those rebels who so recently plunged our country into rebellion and civil war.
Can anyone here contemplate such evil without horror?
Anyone who denies this truth makes themselves an enemy of God, king, and country.
Think on that before you take another step towards chaos.
All the world may see what a point we have come to.
Nothing that begins in such division is likely to end well.
I declare Parliament dissolved.
Gentlemen, go home.
I will not trouble you any further.
Gentlemen, go home.
Okay, huge.
This is going to be the hugest, most wonderful monarchy in the history of the world.
I got those clips confused.
That was actually King Charles II dissolving parliament.
But it was a very similar clip to President Trump in the Rose Garden yesterday threatening to adjourn both houses of Congress.
And this is making heads explode, not just...
On the left, but some heads explode on the right as well.
Here is, and again, I'm sorry for my confusion, here is President Trump.
The Senate has left Washington until at least May 4th.
The Constitution provides a mechanism for the president to fill positions in such circumstances.
The recess appointment, it's called.
The Senate's practice of gaveling into so-called pro-forma sessions where no one Is even there.
Has prevented me from using the constitutional authority that we're giving.
That we're given under the recess provisions.
The Senate should either fulfill its duty and vote on my nominees or it should formally adjourn so that I can make recess appointments.
We have a tremendous number of people that have to come into government and now more so than ever before because of the virus and the problem.
We have to do it.
And we have to do whatever we have to do.
If the House will not agree to that adjournment, I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress.
Oh, man.
Okay, it's not quite as good as Charles II, but it's very, very close.
If only...
If only he had ended that statement by saying, I will not trouble you any further.
Go home.
Then it would have been almost exactly the same.
The left and some people on the right are freaking out over this because they say this is an outrageous, unconstitutional power grab.
Let me direct your attention to Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution.
The president may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper.
He has this authority to adjourn them.
He has this power to recess appointments.
Some people on the left don't understand this.
So Karen Tumulty over at the Washington Post, she tweets out, How do people who used to claim they respected the Constitution reconcile this?
Tea Party?
Where are you?
Trump threatens to adjourn Congress to get his nominees through.
You're asking how...
People who respect the Constitution can go along with President Trump exercising a power that he has explicitly granted in the Constitution.
That's the question?
Pretty easily, I guess.
Without very much difficulty at all.
This is my favorite version of this.
We're looking up on the internet.
Okay, Trump, I guess, has this power.
Maybe I'm misreading the Constitution.
What do people think about this?
What do the commentators and the news people, what do they say about this?
September 23rd, 1964.
This is a headline in the New York Times.
President has authority to send Congress home.
Oh, I love it.
It's the same principle as there's a tweet for everything.
You know, when President Trump says something, people dig back 10 years in his tweets and they find a tweet that contradicts what he's just doing.
Well, we can play that same game with the New York Times.
Usually we can do that, you know, month by month because when a Democrat does something, it's fine.
And when a Republican does something, it's terrible in the New York Times.
We have to go back a little further here, but just go to 1964.
New York Times president has the authority to send Congress home.
Very, very fun.
Trump obviously knew this.
His advisors obviously knew this.
So yet again, they tee up the left.
The left goes crazy.
And then he just knocks it right out of the park.
The rest of the press conference was good.
You know, obviously all of these have been pretty interesting.
It's allowing Trump to control the narrative.
So increasingly they're getting combative.
And this is because yesterday we talked about how the tide has turned.
The backlash has begun.
This is across party lines.
You've now got liberal governors who are moving away from panic, moving into economic recovery.
Trump is going on the offensive more so than usual.
And he's going after the reporters and he's questioning their premises.
So one of the premises that the left has been trying to build up to is that the United States totally bungled the pandemic and It was the United States' fault, and now we've got the most coronavirus deaths anywhere in the world.
And part of the way they can get away with this is because China has been lying about their numbers.
If you look at the growth of coronavirus in China, it goes up, it goes up, it's increasing steadily, it's exponentially, and then one day it just stops.
Okay, and they say, oh, no more cases, we're all good.
And that's just not how viruses work.
The Chinese government obviously lies all the time, and specifically about this pandemic, their lies are the reason that it's spread around the world.
So no reason to believe them unless you're in the mainstream media and you want to attack Trump.
So they use this premise, and Trump just shoots it straight down.
Why do we have 20% of the world's deaths from the coronavirus and only 4% of the world's population?
Well, you don't know what you have.
Do you think you're getting honest numbers from some of these countries?
Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China?
And that they have a certain number of cases and a certain number of deaths.
Does anybody really believe that?
Here's the story.
We report everything.
We're reporting the cases.
And our reporting is good.
We're reporting every death.
In fact, I see this morning where New York added 3,000 deaths because they died.
And they're now saying rather than it was a heart attack, they're saying it was a heart attack caused by this.
So they're adding.
If you look at it, that's it.
And everything we have is documented, reported.
And what they are doing is, just in case, they're calling it this, and that's okay.
That's okay.
But we are, we have more cases because we do more reporting.
We have more cases because everything is down.
But does anybody really believe the numbers of some of these countries that you've been watching and you've been reporting on?
Does anybody believe it?
No, nobody believes it.
Even the mainstream media doesn't really believe it.
They're just saying this to attack President Trump.
And on that point, actually, Fox News now has multiple sources confirming something that we have been talking about for weeks.
We've been talking about it not just on this show.
I've also been talking about it on Verdict, my show with Senator Ted Cruz.
And when we raised this suggestion, the mainstream media referred to us as conspiracy theorists without basis.
And not just to us.
They did it to Senator Tom Cotton.
They did it to anybody who raised the possibility that this pandemic was in any way connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It's that very high level virus lab that happened to be studying coronavirus, that happened to be studying coronavirus in bats, that happened to be two miles by car and 800 yards by foot away from the Wuhan wet market where all this allegedly started.
If you suggested any connection between the two, oh, you were a kook.
You were crazy.
You had no evidence.
Well, now Fox News is reporting multiple sources confirm the virus originated in the Wuhan laboratory.
It was being studied in the Wuhan laboratory.
Whether it came at its inception from nature or elsewhere, it was at that laboratory and it got out.
Here's the question.
Here's Trump's answer.
Multiple sources are telling Fox News today that the United States government now has high confidence that while the coronavirus is a naturally occurring virus, it emanated from a virology lab in Wuhan.
That because of lack safety protocols, an intern was infected who later infected her boyfriend and then went to the wet market in Wuhan where it began to spread.
Does that correspond with what you Well, I don't want to say that, John, but I will tell you more and more we're hearing the story.
And we'll see.
When you say multiple sources, now there's a case where you can use the word sources.
But we are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation that happened.
Obviously, President Trump is giving a diplomatic answer here because part of his job is to manage international relations.
It's actually why he hasn't smacked China nearly as hard as you would expect him to maybe if he were merely on the campaign trail.
Part of that is he's got to work with China right now on this pandemic.
Part of that is they've just negotiated this very difficult trade deal.
Part of that is there are more factors at play.
But you can hear in his answer the subtext is pretty clear.
Yes, there are strong indications that this came from the lab, which frankly is just common sense, okay?
Anybody who has any reasonable grasp of probability should have known that this was a very likely situation.
This is a humiliation.
For the mainstream media who called the suggestion a conspiracy theory because they're carrying water for the communist regime in China.
And there's more good news too.
We heard yesterday from the liberal governors Andy Cuomo in New York and Gavin Newsom in California that things are looking good.
They've turned a corner.
They want to reopen not just the state.
They want to reopen the region.
That the political phenomenon of the coronavirus pandemic is over.
Even though, obviously, medically, this is going to continue for some long period of time, as a political phenomenon, as a matter of the shutdowns, it's done.
There's more evidence of this today.
Andy Cuomo announced in his latest press conference that things are going so well in New York, even though obviously the death numbers lag, the hospitalization numbers, so the death numbers still might be pretty scary, the hospitalization numbers are decreasing so steadily that New York is actually going to be giving away ventilators to other states.
On the ventilators, we've stabilized our health care situation.
New York had one of the earlier curves.
There are other places in this country are now seeing increases in the death rate, and they're seeing stress on their healthcare system.
I will never forget the generosity that people across this country showed to our state.
And I said at that time, New Yorkers are generous, and they are grateful and gracious, and when you need help, we will be there for you.
And we will be.
State of Michigan is going through an issue right now.
State of Maryland is going through an issue.
We're stabilized.
We're going to send 100 ventilators to Michigan and 50 to the state of Maryland.
Now, obviously, if New York were still in the peak of this chaos, they wouldn't be able to give away ventilators.
Don't forget what we had been hearing for weeks and weeks is New York doesn't have enough ventilators, doesn't have enough hospitals, we need to take over the Javits Center, we need to get a cruise ship, a hospital ship, down here to take care of everybody, and then that was not needed.
So, fewer people went to the hospital than they expected, fewer people needed the ventilators than they expected, now they have so much access they're able to give it away.
That's in New York, the epicenter of the epidemic in America.
Great news.
It's not just in New York, though.
It's also in California.
One point on Andy Cuomo, though.
I, again, was speaking to a friend of mine from New York yesterday.
And he said, I was watching Andy Cuomo say that New Yorker is always gracious and grateful and nice to everybody.
Has Andy Cuomo ever met a New Yorker?
Ha ha!
And I have to say, myself being a New Yorker, I was a little puzzled at that.
One thing, too, that you notice in these press conferences from Cuomo, he turns up the New York accent.
So, if you were to listen to him here, you'd hear like, hey, but you know, look, this is New York.
We're really grateful, really gracious people.
That's not really how Andy Cuomo talks.
I've run into Andy Cuomo twice in person.
I was a kitchen runner.
I was like a waiter for him one time when I was in high school.
And then one time during Hurricane Sandy, when I was living in New York, I was hanging out in my apartment building.
Luckily, before Hurricane Sandy hit, one of our neighbors had catered an event and brought back I think 15 cases of beer.
So we, you know, indulged a little bit.
And then like a bunch of young idiots in the middle of the storm went out walking around with a beer and a cigar and kind of surveyed the damage.
And the only other guy we run into out there is Andy Cuomo, who was there with two cops surveying the damage.
And anyway, I say all of that to point out, he knows how to play it up for the cameras.
He's obviously angling for some kind of national profile here.
He's playing up this whole New York character.
That's fine.
That's all well and good.
If he could play up the drama of the situation in New York even more, he certainly would do that.
The fact that he's now moving into this more positive, more hopeful angle means that politically we've turned the corner.
Gavin Newsom's doing the same thing.
Gavin Newsom is being very, very generous with California's resources, meaning with all of your taxpayer money.
Gavin Newsom is now going to be giving away taxpayer money to illegal aliens in the state who are no longer able to work.
Because of the shutdown, he's giving $500 per person to 150,000 illegal aliens throughout the state.
That's according to the Associated Press.
So you're a criminal, you break our laws, you break very important laws by crossing our border illegally.
You remain here, you don't leave, and what happens to you?
You get more of our taxpayer money.
Wow, how generous.
Typical lunacy from leftist California, but I pointed out to show you, if...
Things were really dire in California if all the doomsday alarmists were right and California was just as bad as New York and getting even worse.
They wouldn't have the resources to do this kind of thing.
But they do have a lot of extra resources because it didn't hit nearly as badly as we were told it was going to.
So now they're giving it away to illegal aliens.
This is...
fine evidence that we can start moving forward.
But the only way that we're going to move forward is if you and I turn up the heat on these politicians.
The politicians, their only superpower is they can tell which way the wind blows.
We got to make sure that they feel a strong wind.
Speaking of criminals, by the way, you know, part of this whole coronavirus response is that some local governments are releasing criminals.
Many local governments are releasing criminals.
And the idea behind it was we don't want the jails to be overcrowded.
We don't want them to spread coronavirus to each other.
We want to, in the midst of a crisis, release a bunch of violent thugs onto the street.
And that way they can spread coronavirus to you as they're burgling your apartment.
So typically, as you might expect, this did not end very well.
I And we predicted on this show, I'll point out, that this would not end very well.
And now we've got our evidence.
According to a Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, deputies arrested a 26-year-old, Joseph Edward Williams, for homicide that happened in Tampa, Florida, on March 20th.
Okay.
Okay.
We hear these stories all the time.
People commit murder.
He's facing a second-degree murder charge along with resisting an officer, with violence, felon in possession of a firearm, possession of heroin, and possession of drug paraphernalia.
Okay, so he was arrested, what, March 20th.
The thing that makes this story notable is that he was also arrested a week earlier.
He was arrested a week earlier on drug charges.
But they let him go because coronavirus or something.
They let him go.
A week later, he murders somebody.
Someone is dead because of their stupid criminal justice policies in the face of coronavirus.
Is his victim going to be added to the list of coronavirus deaths?
Probably he should.
Right?
It's because of the coronavirus response that A person is dead today who would not otherwise have been dead because this criminal would not have been let out of prison.
These are important data points for people, not just who are defending the overreaction from the governments here, but who defend letting criminals out of prison.
This has become popular even on the right, not just on the left, because on the right they think it's a good way to pander to voters.
They say, look, we want to let criminals out of prison.
There are too many criminals in prison.
Never mind what they did, never mind the crimes they committed or are going to commit.
We just got to let them out because it feels icky to lock people up.
It's not icky.
It's a good thing.
Lock up criminals.
Lock up more criminals.
You think we have an over-incarceration problem?
As long as crimes are being committed, I suppose we have an under-incarceration problem.
A little bit of reality coming up against all the models and the projections and the dreams and the fantasies.
Speaking of crimes and fantasies, Jussie Smollett is back in the news.
How's that for a segue?
There's a new report out that Jussie Smollett, apparently, this is a little not safe for work, Jussie Smollett Went to a gay bathhouse in Chicago with his alleged attacker and had sex with him, which is obviously a little strange because Jussie Smollett attacked himself, and it reminds me of Woody Allen's famous line, not to knock masturbation because it is sex with someone you love.
I guess what the article is referring to, and the news report is referring to, is not that Smollett had sex with his attacker, because he was his own attacker, but that he apparently had sex with the guy who he paid to pretend to be his attacker.
They had a long-standing relationship.
They went to this gay bathhouse, and all of this is very possibly going to be subpoenaed in Jussie Smollett's upcoming trial on charges of disorderly conduct.
People are getting a little lonely in this epidemic, okay?
Speaking of self-love, people are getting a little bit lonely.
There's a study that just came out.
Four in ten Americans right now are lonelier than ever before.
A survey of 1,055 Americans asked respondents to answer this question, how is the coronavirus affecting you personally?
And actually more than 4 in 10, 44% of them said that they are now feeling lonelier than ever before.
Another unintended or unfortunate consequence of this coronavirus shutdown.
Maybe it's not intended, but anybody with two brain cells to rub together could tell.
Obviously people are going to be lonely if you imprison them in their apartments for months at a time.
This has effects on society.
It will lead to more suicides.
It will lead to more depression.
It will lead to more drug abuse.
It also is a symptom of an atomized, lonely, isolated culture.
Especially young people who would have been married in decades past are not married right now.
They don't have, forget about marriage, they don't even have support systems of their own family or their own local community or strong friendships that they might have had in decades past.
People across demographics, across ages, are isolated.
Not just because the government is forcing them to stay in their homes, but because of their own behaviors.
There's a kind of paradox that comes with this or a kind of contradiction that comes with this.
Because we have a culture now where people are sleeping with a lot of different people.
That's more socially acceptable.
And yet they're even lonelier.
The key to this is an article that was in New York Magazine yesterday.
What it's like to isolate with your girlfriend and her other boyfriend.
I encourage you to read it.
It's like the saddest and funniest article I've read in weeks.
I don't know which it is.
I think it's both at the same time.
But once you get past laughing at this poor guy, and by the way, I feel sorry for every single person in this scenario, but there's actually something profound at the end of the article.
So it's an interview with this guy who hosts a podcast called The Man Whore Podcast.
I guess everybody's got a podcast these days.
And he's staying at his girlfriend's apartment that she has with her other boyfriend and they're like sharing the girlfriend and it's very creepy and weird.
Then, once you get past all the effeminacy and sadness, he gets to his line, which shows you a kind of selfishness here.
He says, there's part of me that's relieved that Megan has another person here, because then I don't have to be everything to her.
I don't have to give her all the attention that's needed.
I don't have to give her all of the cuddles that are needed, because she has another partner in general.
That's the really cool thing about polyamory.
I don't feel the pressure of being everything for someone.
Wow, what an amazing line that is.
I don't feel the pressure of being everything for someone.
And in a more stressful time like this, it's a relief to know that if I need to have some alone time, she's good with that.
And if she does have a need, she can tap somebody else, so to speak.
Yuck, gross, sad, pathetic.
The flaw in this guy's reasoning is...
This error that we have in our society.
We believe, as the society has become more materialistic, that the way to have a good, fulfilling, happy life is to pursue our own desires and to pursue our own appetites.
Forget about all that old-timey stuff that restrains your desires and tells you that you can't do everything you want to do whenever you want to do it.
Get rid of that, man.
Break free.
Liberate yourself.
And then if you have a girlfriend and she's got three boyfriends and then you've got six girlfriends, that'll be so good because you don't have responsibility.
This is the mistake they're making.
They think that responsibility makes you unhappy and a lack of accountability makes you really happy.
But actually that's not true.
I know it seems true.
That's what every young person has ever thought who resists marriage, who resists commitment, who resists getting a job.
But actually nobody is gratified when they go home and look at porn and stuff their faces and drink too much and lie on the couch and don't accomplish anything.
That makes you depressed.
That makes you sad, makes you into a loser.
If however, you give of yourself, You sacrifice some of yourself.
You care about other people.
You do things that you don't want to do because it's the right thing to do.
You take on a job.
You take on the responsibilities of a family.
It seems like that would make you less happy.
Actually, it makes you much more gratified in life.
There is a phenomenon that I've just learned about called Only Fans.
Have you heard about this?
Only Fans is a level of pornography that A level of debauchery that I'm very grateful that I've never been exposed to.
Of all the debauchery I've been exposed to, somehow I was able to avoid that one.
OnlyFans is this website where you log on and you have to pay like 10 or 20 bucks a month to subscribe to a person who is a homemade porn star.
Someone, there's no, it's the total democratization of porn.
No more gatekeepers.
The girls log on and they say, I'm going to become an only fan performer.
And then the guys log on and they pay her 10, 20, however much per month.
And you get access to photos and some, some are very banal, right?
Just updates about their day.
For some of these girls, they don't even take their clothes off.
They're kind of racy pictures, but they don't take their clothes off.
It's actually that you're paying not for the naked photos.
You're paying for the semblance of a relationship.
How sad is that?
Because obviously there are a zillion naked ladies on the internet.
You can look on the internet for free without putting down a credit card and see...
Anything that you want to see, any sick thing that you can imagine, I promise you it's out there.
This is one of the laws of the internet.
And yet people are paying money to see oftentimes not naked women.
And what they're paying for is to feel as though they've got some kind of relationship with this person.
That is the height of decadence.
That is the height of debauchery.
It's probably of all the dark, weird kinds of porn on the internet.
This might be the darkest one because it reflects a society that's now so isolated, that's become so alienated from itself that it can't even have a normal platonic relationship or a normal flirtatious relationship.
You actually have to pay for that now.
You don't need to pay to see weird sex.
You do have to pay to feel any human connection.
That is not a problem of isolation only in quarantine.
That is a much bigger problem.
It's going to last longer than the coronavirus does.
That is for sure.
Okay, we're going to get to the mailbag.
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We'll be right back with the mailbag.
I am going to fly through this mailbag because, as usual, I'm running late.
From Matt, austere religious podcaster and lord of the covfefe, you seem to be a student of both Dante and ancient Rome.
As such, my question involves both.
Namely, does Brutus deserve his place in Dante's hell alongside Judas?
Thanks for the great show and keep up the good work.
Came for Ben, stayed for Michael.
Yes, Brutus is the guy who was friends with Caesar who murders Julius Caesar.
And in Dante, he's represented in the absolute lowest pit of hell, which is a lake of ice in which Satan is trapped.
Satan is a three-headed monster.
And in his teeth, in each of his jaws, he's chewing Brutus and Cassius, who killed Caesar, and Judas, who killed Christ.
Brutus does deserve his place in hell.
Brutus is sometimes considered a good person because he tried to stop the tyranny of Caesar and he tried to defend the Republic.
The reason that Brutus...
deserves his place in the lowest level of hell is that he betrayed his benefactor.
He betrayed his friend.
And that is the worst possible crime you can commit.
You know, in Dante's Hell, you've got the early kind of fleshly sins.
Those are in the upper layers of hell.
It's not quite as painful.
And then you get down lower and lower to the worst sins.
And the worst sins you get to are the sins of fraud or the sins of betrayal.
They're the worst things that you can possibly do.
And The people who engage in fraud and betrayal, for instance, of their benefactors, they deserve the absolute worst punishments that there are.
From Joshua, Michael, my state of Minnesota issued a lockdown and extended it until May.
Although I do believe in public health as an exception to normal government rules, how long can a lockdown go on before we reach 1984 levels of government intrusion?
I love the podcast.
This long.
That's how long.
Exactly this long.
And now it's gone too far.
Okay, when you're arresting pastors but letting criminals out onto the street so they can go murder people, which is actually happening, you have gone too far.
When the models that you were using were all shown to be incorrect and then you respond to that by doubling down and adding more draconian measures and threatening to fine or jail people for not following those measures like is happening here in Los Angeles, you have gone too far.
These people have been overstepping their bounds when the police come out and say you no longer have a First Amendment right to protest because protesting is a non-essential activity.
The government has gone too far and now is the time to push back.
From Michelle, can you speak to the report that 3,700 deaths were just added to the death count in New York without testing for coronavirus?
How is this allowed to happen?
Can someone ask Dr.
Birx or Fauci, how can we stop this?
That did happen in New York just the other day.
Deaths that had obviously already happened, which did not include a test for coronavirus, were added to the death count in New York.
Now, the defense of this is that perhaps there weren't tests available, they weren't able to determine with certainty whether or not these people had coronavirus, but it seems likely that they did, so they're going to add it to the death count.
The argument against this is this is BS to pad the death numbers and to take a more liberal counting view, to use Dr. Birx's own terms.
Coronavirus is very difficult to take a look at the deaths because the victims are so overwhelmingly old and they so overwhelmingly have comorbidities.
And so let's say you die of a heart attack.
Did you die of a heart attack or did you die of coronavirus?
Let's say you have stage four lung cancer and you've got three weeks to live, but you die one week into that because you also have coronavirus.
Did you die from coronavirus or from the lung cancer?
Most of us would say the lung cancer, but it is complicated because the coronavirus hastened your death.
So increasingly, all the politicians are going to be taking the broader view of what counts as a coronavirus death.
That, I think, has very little to do with medical science, has a lot to do with politics, because they've got to defend their decision to shut down the global economy and throw 20 million people out of work.
Nobody is going to want to turn that around because all of the political incentives for these politicians are to have the larger defensible number rather than the smaller, more conservative number.
From Michael.
Hi, Michael.
What is your perspective on human nature?
Oh, just that small topic?
Does your view primarily stem from religious beliefs, philosophy, or both?
How do these views shape your ideas on the role of government?
Personally, I find myself agreeing with John Calvin's idea of total depravity and with Thomas Hobbes that people will always act in self-interest.
Thanks.
Well, I don't think we can just narrowly say my view of human nature comes from philosophy or my view comes from religion.
My view of human nature comes from my eyes and my brain, okay?
I see people, I interact with people, I talk to people, and I think about how...
And I try to make sense of that.
That's what we all do.
I do not agree with John Calvin's view of human nature.
John Calvin's view of human nature is called total depravity.
It's the idea that human beings are totally, utterly, completely depraved.
I don't agree with that.
I don't believe that is true.
If you do agree with that, and as you say, you agree with Thomas Hobbes and other political thinkers along that line, then certainly you could not support the American government or self-government, because people are totally depraved, so they're absolutely unqualified to support.
To govern themselves.
Now, on the other hand, I also don't support the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, idealistic view of human nature, that human nature is mostly 99% good.
You know, obviously there's some bad things now and again, but really we're all just fine and dandy.
I don't believe that is true either.
I support the middle view of things, which is that man is made in the image of God, which is good, and man is fallen through the abuse of his free will, Which is bad.
I believe in original sin.
I think that sin and death pervade the world and all of us commit sins and we can commit very, very bad sins and we can look really wrong and bad and perverted.
Also, we have a goodness that comes to us, which is why human beings obviously don't only act in self-interest.
When an old lady is about to get hit by a bus and a young person...
Runs out there and goes to sacrifice himself for her, which situations like this happen all of the time.
Genuine selflessness.
That cannot be explained by men always acting in their own self-interest.
So that's just a sort of narrow, I think, cartoonish ideological view.
The real answer, as is often the case, is in that middle way, which takes into account both of those things.
You could see the same thing when it comes to questions of grace and free will.
Is also, I guess you could bring John Calvin in for this as well.
Do we not have any free will at all?
Everything is totally predestined and predetermined and forget just John Calvin, even these Silicon Valley nincompoops who say that free will is merely an illusion and we're just kidding ourselves.
Is that the case?
Well, that seems false.
But on the other extreme, is it the case that there's no such thing as grace?
No such thing as providence?
The only hope we have is to save ourselves and to act according to our own will?
No, that's obviously not true either.
The real answer is this middle way, which is that will and grace, not the 90s TV show, but the facts of existence, will and grace exist together in a mystery that is sort of like two people dancing a waltz.
From Jack, Senor Covfefe, my wife is pregnant with our first child and I refuse to send him to public school, so one of us will have to stay home.
Her work will pay off her student loans, so she has to stay there.
My problem is that I don't want her to have the responsibility of being the main income.
Is there a problem with me staying home?
I still want to work, even if it's a night job.
Well, I don't think there's a problem, necessarily.
It sounds like you think there's a problem, because you want to work.
And if you want to work, you should work.
You're not going to have to worry about this problem for, what, five years until kindergarten?
I guess now people send their kids to school, quote-unquote, when they're like six months old.
But that's ridiculous, right?
That's just a way to make you feel better about sending a kid to daycare.
So, you know, you've got a little bit of time here, right?
It's so funny.
I mean, when I was in school, I went to kindergarten.
My father didn't even go to kindergarten.
He just started in first grade.
Then when I was a kid, we started in kindergarten.
I didn't go to preschool or anything.
Now kids, it seems like they start going to school at one year old or sometime around there.
But you don't need to do that.
So maybe someone stays home for the first few years and maybe you work a night job.
Maybe you work a job that can be done from home.
One thing we're learning from quarantine is there are a lot of jobs that you can do from home.
Not just e-commerce, which is the most obvious one, or not just, you know, Many other jobs in many different sectors and many different industries.
Now we're finding out you can do things that we thought previously were not possible to do from home.
Things like education.
There was online learning, but the vast majority of education happened in schools.
Now all education is being done online.
That's probably going to transform that sector as well.
So I would try to get creative about it because I agree with you.
Mankind is meant to work.
And raising a kid is a lot of work, but if you're a little bit more traditionally minded and you think it's odd for a father to stay home all the time and not do anything else other than raise kids...
Then that's fine.
I would pursue that.
You don't want to get into a situation where you resent your wife or resent your kid because you're doing something that feels totally unnatural to you.
From Nick, on all axis, you basically summed up yoga as giving the devil a lap dance.
Did I? That sounds more pithy than what I said, but I'll go with it.
Other than the annoying amount of time that those who do yoga talk about it, As Christians, what is so wrong in doing awkward stretches?
Thanks.
The problem isn't the awkward stretches.
The problem is that yoga is a spiritual practice.
It's a Hindu liturgy.
And that's why you always hear yoga teachers.
They're not just talking about the weird stretches.
They're talking about energy and mantras and, you know, the solar plexus.
And when you get to the really weird ones, they talk about like crystals and things like that.
And it's a new agey, weird religion.
So if you want to do stretches, go do Pilates.
Or just stretch.
I think that's a good idea.
I've done yoga in my life, and the stretching feels pretty good.
But the weird religious symbolism and chants and mantras that go along with it don't feel very good if you don't happen to be a part of that religion.
So I would avoid...
Pairing up those two things and just go for a stretch.
Stretches are a little less sexy and a little less hip and less cool, but it will do exactly the same thing for your body and might have a better effect on your soul.
Okay, we know we have so many more questions, but we're out of time, as always.
I'm going to be filling in for the Ben Shapiro radio show, though, so you will get hours and hours more for us to hang out.
We're going to be taking your calls there as well, so tune in for when that's going to be.
And in the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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