Joe Biden mutters incoherently, Don Lemon shows us why the Left can’t meme, and the Supreme Court magnanimously allows a group of nuns to pray another day.
Ben's new book "How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps" is coming out July 21st. Get your signed copy here => https://utm.io/uGvC
If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/knowles
This podcast is sponsored by Blinksale, the revolutionary invoicing software for contractors and small businesses. Spend less time billing and more time making bank with Blinksale! Free trial here => https://bit.ly/2Vy6LN8
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
But the trouble is that Joe Biden's unwellness, his obvious decline, tells us something.
About the broader Democratic Party and the broader left.
This was Joe Biden's rousing campaign speech.
I mean, this will go down in the annals of statesman-like rhetoric with Winston Churchill's fight on the beaches, with Ronald Reagan's time for choosing, and with Joe Biden's muttering incoherently.
Lonnie knows I believe this every fiber might be.
We're posed.
What I propose is...
It can be done.
I think we're in a position to really make it happen.
And my team and your team are already working closely together to light up the path forward here.
Critical laws like the Pro Act to strengthen collective bargaining.
On politics like prevailing and...
Look, I guess I'm taking too much time.
If you pretend it's slam poetry, it's actually much less sad.
If you pretend it's slam poetry, it's actually got a kind of vibe to it.
You know, we're posed.
And the pro.
And the, anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.
But we can all laugh.
And in some cases, we're not laughing.
We're saying, this is really sad.
No one should let this guy run.
His decline, his selection, the things he's saying, the very fact that he doesn't know the lingo we're all talking about shows you completely how out of touch the Democratic Party is with the United States, with the American people, and why they're just not going to fix it.
We'll get into it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
We're posed on this beautiful Thursday.
Got to thank our friends over at Ring.
You know these days it's good to protect yourself.
It's good to protect yourself against people who want to steal your stuff.
And there are a lot of people out there these days who are doing that.
Ring is on a mission to make neighborhoods safer.
Their home security products are designed to give you peace of mind around the clock.
Ring gives you protection at every corner.
Video doorbells let you answer the door and check in on your home anytime.
Very helpful to me.
I travel.
Even with this coronavirus, I still travel.
And sweet little Lisa's good with a shotgun, but I want to make sure that I can check in at any time.
And it's great.
Even if you're in the house, even if you're at the office, you can check in and just be with your home, even when you're not at your home.
With outdoor security cameras, you can check in on every part of your house.
Never miss a moment.
Smart lighting brightens up blind spots.
Make sure you always come home to a brightly lit house.
Really a tremendous product.
Get a special offer right now on a Ring welcome kit when you go to ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. This is my favorite thing to give away as a housewarming present to people for two reasons.
One, it's really cool and it really helps you.
Two, it's inexpensive and it makes me look like a cool guy.
The welcome kit includes the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and Chime Pro.
It's all you need to start building custom security for your home today.
So, Biden mutters incoherently, and that's not surprising at all.
But he also mutters incoherently on public policy itself.
So he mutters incoherently on the culture itself.
And he's not exactly alone in this.
What Joe Biden is showing us is it's not merely a process of mental decline, you would say.
It's a process of political decline for the left and for the Democratic Party.
Joe Biden wants you all to know, not only is he posed, but everybody is woked.
All the talk the last 20 years about driving down the rationale for unions, all of a sudden, this phrase, everybody's been woked.
Well, guess what?
The rest of the working class people in America have been awakened and realized, whoa, why?
Because I work at a fast food restaurant that I have to sign an agreement that I will not compete A non-compete agreement that I will not go across town to another fast food restaurant and try to get a raise.
What in the hell is that about?
You know that phrase, everybody's been woked.
People are attributing this to his mental decline, but it's not that exactly.
Joe Biden is not the first Democratic candidate in recent years to not understand the popular culture, to not be able to meme, as we describe about the left.
Hillary Clinton, do you remember in 2016, she had one of the most cringe-inducing political lines I've ever heard.
This was when that app Pokemon Go was very briefly popular, and you'd walk around with your phone and collect Pokemon.
Anyway, she was trying to make this cultural reference, and she had this line.
She told you that you had to take your love of Pokemon and bring it in to the election booth.
Because we're going to have a lot of jobs, jobs from building infrastructure to coding, creating new apps.
I don't know who created Pokemon Go, but I'm trying to figure out how we get them to have Pokemon go to the polls.
Oh, boy, oh boy.
Try the veal, folks.
Tip your waitress.
You get it?
Pokemon, go to the polls.
Take my wife, please!
Oh, man, that would be too lame for, like, a 40s Borscht Belt comic.
But why does the left do this?
It doesn't make a lot of sense, because the left is the hip, young, woke, cool, right?
So how come the left can't meme?
This is an eternal question.
It's at least a question that we've been asking ourselves for the last four years.
The left always says they're the cool, hip, future political movement, and yet they can't meme.
They can't tell jokes.
They can't make people laugh with spontaneous humor on the internet.
They have to go through these contrived institutions.
The reason for this is because the left controls the entire establishment.
They run everything.
We've made this point on this show before.
They control the mainstream media, Hollywood, big tech, higher education, lower education, administrative government.
They've got everything.
The newspapers write everything.
And Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are pretty good examples of this.
So they can't meme.
Because to meme is to subvert the establishment.
To meme is to point out an absurdity of the establishment.
I mean, this is in part, you could broaden this out not just from internet memes or these little one-off jokes, but humor more generally.
Humor thrives on incongruity and absurdity and recognizing a certain truth that is not being talked about.
Pointing out that truth to highlight then how ridiculous the mainstream established order is.
But the left is the mainstream established order.
They are not only creators of the established order, they're the enforcers of the established order.
And so they can't be funny.
It's why you think of political correctness, right?
People scolding you for telling jokes, for saying words, canceling Kevin Hart because he made a joke 10 years ago.
The left has this problem, and they're trying to work it out now, and Joe Biden is just an egregious example of the failure of trying to work this out.
You cannot simultaneously be the establishment and subvert the establishment, at least not in any serious way.
You can have the kind of typical liberalism of the rhetoric of liberation, but in terms of the actual institutions, you can't be the establishment and subvert yourself.
A good example beyond politics of why this doesn't work, why the left can't meme, why they can't speak to us directly, why there seems to be a disconnect between the mainstream media and the American people or Joe Biden and the American people.
The reason for this is they don't know what we believe.
They have no idea, even the most basic elements of what we believe.
They are caught in a fantasy world.
The left is living in a fantasy world that's easy to live in because it is based on their ideology.
The thing about ideology is ideology is always wrong.
There's reality, and then there's ideology, which tries to formalize reality into a five-bullet-point manifesto, but that just doesn't work.
So they've got this ideology, and because they have the protection of all of the institutions, they very rarely have to come up to face with reality.
When they do, it's at moments where they let reality have a word in, like the 2016 election, or the Brexit vote, or a few other of these moments in recent years, and they're shocked.
They can't believe it, because they've felt so comfortable in their reality, in their fantasy, rather.
Don Lemon on CNN goes on CNN with his friend Chris Cuomo, and they're talking about how much they don't like the Founding Fathers, and we've got to pull the Founding Fathers off of pedestals.
And the example that Don Lemon gives as to why this is the case is that not even Jesus was perfect when he was walking on this earth.
Take a listen.
Here's the thing.
Jesus Christ, if you believe in, if that's who you believe in, Jesus Christ, admittedly was not perfect when he was here on this earth.
So why are we deifying the founders of this country?
Admittedly.
Who's admitting that?
That guy, Don Lemon, is saying that.
He's declaring that.
But Jesus, just a little history, theology lesson for you all.
Jesus is perfect and was perfect when he walked on this earth.
And he necessarily must be.
That is perhaps the most basic aspect of the incarnation.
He is God.
He has to be perfect.
Don Lemon, he seems honest.
He seems like he honestly is ignorant.
He honestly doesn't know what he's saying.
But consider that.
I like to think, I don't think we're flattering ourselves, that on the right, conservatives, even more moderate people, we understand the left.
We understand the left, not even through any great achievement of our own, just because we live in a leftist culture, so we're confronted with what the left believes all the time.
The left does not believe the right.
And to take this matter into religious circumstances, atheists don't understand Christianity.
Very rarely has an atheist understood Christianity and rejected it outright.
I think what is most evident here is that biblical literacy, the foundation of our education, does not exist on the left.
They just don't know the most basic aspects.
And so how could they comment on it?
How could they subvert something?
How could they get a funny jive in or a meme?
They don't know, even most fundamentally, what they are talking about.
Was this always the case?
Was it always the case that the left just didn't get it, or has the problem gotten worse?
The left always lived in an ideological fantasy world.
But the problem has gotten much, much worse.
And actually, Don Lemon proves it to us.
We'll get to that in one second.
First, I've got to thank our friends over at Blink Sale.
You should not have to waste your time creating ugly invoices on your computer.
Just don't do it.
It's a waste of effort that could be spent on doing the thing that you actually do for your business.
With BlinkSale, you can send beautiful custom branded invoices and estimates in seconds.
You can stay on top of your outstanding invoices.
You can let your customers and clients easily pay your invoices online.
BlinkSale takes care of it all, so you can spend more time focusing on the work that actually gets you paid and makes your business a success.
And as an added bonus right now, BlinkSale is giving away $10 to 500 Daily Wire fans.
You go to blinksale.com, you start your 14-day free trial, you create your first invoice of $10, and you activate an online payment option, Stripe or PayPal.
Then you send that invoice to dailywire at blinksale.com.
And you will get paid your $10 invoice.
The first 500 people to send an invoice for $10 to Daily Wire at BlinkSale.com will get it paid by BlinkSale.
Limit of one per person, unfortunately.
Otherwise, I would be sending very many.
Stop wasting time invoicing and try BlinkSale for free at BlinkSale.com slash Knowles.
That's B-L-I-N-K-S-A-L-E dot com slash Knowles.
BlinkSale.
Spend less time billing, more time doing what you love.
The problem has gotten worse.
The left has gotten more disconnected from reality.
You have to look no further for proof of this than Don Lemon himself, who just seven years ago, this was in 2013, I believe, Don Lemon was on CNN.
He was talking about some of the racial tensions that were cropping up back then.
And he, he actually deferred to Bill O'Reilly.
He deferred to conservatives.
He deferred to people who were pointing out that most of the social problems among black Americans don't come from the cops.
The vast, vast majority don't come from the cops.
They come from social dysfunction that has arisen for a variety of reasons, but which can only be fixed within the black community.
It's time now for some tough love on the subject.
The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family.
He's got a point.
In fact, he's got more than a point.
Bill?
Raised without much structure, young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs.
Nobody forces them to do that.
Again, it is a personal decision.
He is right about that too.
But in my estimation, he doesn't go far enough.
Because black people, if you really want to fix the problem, here's just five things that you should think about doing.
Here's number five.
Pull up your pants.
Number four now is the N-word.
Now number three.
Respect where you live.
Start small by not dropping trash, littering in your own communities.
I've lived in several predominantly white neighborhoods in my life.
I rarely, if ever, witness people littering.
Alright, slow down there, David Duke.
Come on, Richard Spencer.
Cool it with the racism.
Of course, nothing he said is bigoted or racist or anything like that.
But today, could you imagine if he said that today?
We had to play a slightly condensed cut of that.
But I forget who posted it.
Someone posted it to Twitter.
You can see the entire...
Link.
He goes on and on.
We actually had to truncate it a little bit.
If Don Lemon were to say that today on CNN, well, he couldn't say it on CNN, but even if you said it on a conservative cable news channel, I'm not sure you could get away with it.
Frankly, I think you might get canceled for it.
You might be told that's racially inflammatory.
That's offensive.
That's politically incorrect.
Even CNN's own hosts were talking about this seven years ago.
The problem has accelerated.
And as it accelerates, it's going to create more problems.
The Democrats would have a better chance of winning elections.
The left would have a better chance of winning hearts and minds if they were a little bit more connected to reality.
This is the great conservative consolation, by the way, because the left always takes the culture because they promise you free stuff.
They don't only promise you free money, though they promise you that as well, but they promise you free sex.
They promise you free leisure.
They promise you free indulgence of your appetites.
They promise you fundamentally that things don't have costs.
You can do whatever you want sexually and not face any consequences.
You can eat as much as you want and not face any consequences.
You can laze around as much as you want and not face any consequences.
And the conservatives have to come in with this unpopular message, which is, no, everything in life has a consequence.
You can't free yourself and liberate yourself from every single thing in the world, and even if you did, it would make you miserable.
So, we're at a disadvantage when it comes to that kind of messaging, because the left gets to come in and give you free stuff.
But, reality reasserts itself in the end.
That's the great conservative constellation.
Because when the left gets so completely disconnected from reality, people know that.
And we joke about that, and we laugh about that, and we send memes around about that.
So...
No matter what they're telling you in the mainstream media.
And I think there are things that the Trump campaign can fix.
And I think they've got to reopen the country ASAP where the left is going to have a real advantage.
Actually, that's another great example.
There's now no scientific reason whatsoever for the lockdown.
The lockdown was meant to flatten the curve so that we could spread out the cases, not overwhelm the health care system.
We're nowhere close to overwhelming the health care system.
We never got close.
We never even got close in New York.
We had empty hospitals in New York and an empty hospital ship in New York.
There is not one argument for a renewed lockdown, scientifically.
But there's a major political argument for the lockdown, which is that it helps Biden because it lets him stay in his basement where he doesn't have to talk too much.
And it shuts down Trump from campaigning.
And it puts us on the road to having national widespread mail-in ballots, which are rife with fraud.
And we've pointed out cases of that fraud over just the past few weeks on this very show.
Okay, this is a great example, actually, of the disconnect between the scientific reality and the political ideology here.
And there are a lot of people looking around and saying, wait a second, you told us not to wear masks a few months ago.
We see on the CDC website that masks don't do very much at all.
Your own arguments are contradictory.
You told us that a zillion people are going to die.
That hasn't happened.
You told us the point of the lockdown wasn't even to save people's lives, just to spread out the deaths.
What are we doing?
That moves in our favor.
So the left, if the right can wake up to it and finally actually advocate for our own positions, the left is not in a good place.
And we know this because, as I predicted just a few days ago, they are already calling for Joe Biden to skip out on the debates.
Tom Friedman, the great, the inimitable Tom Friedman, writing in the New York Times, says, Biden should not debate Trump unless...
I worry about Joe Biden debating Donald Trump.
He should only do it under two conditions.
Otherwise, he's giving Trump unfair advantages.
First, Biden should declare that he will take part in debate only if Trump releases his tax returns for 2016 through 2018.
Biden has already done so.
They're on his website...
Don't, okay, what does that, what do tax returns have to do with coronavirus and the arguments against the debates?
Nothing.
They just know that it's going to put Trump in a very difficult position because Joe Biden has been on the government dole his entire adult life and Donald Trump is a businessman so he's obviously got complex finances and they just want to open up some new attacks.
Second, Biden should insist that a real-time fact-checking team, approved by both candidates but hired by the Nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, in the ten minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate, this team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers, or outright lies that either candidate has uttered.
There is a fact-checking team at all presidential debates.
It's called the candidates.
That's what they're supposed to do.
They're supposed to say, no, that isn't true.
You just lied about that.
That number's not right.
Now, what the left does is they cheat.
They put in their own moderators and their own fact-checkers, like Candy Crowley, who did this in 2012 when Barack Obama was debating Mitt Romney, and it became a two-on-one debate.
Both of the Democrats against Mitt Romney.
And she lied through her teeth, by the way, and only apologized after the debate when no one was watching anymore.
They know though, Tom Friedman knows, New York Times knows that Joe Biden can't do that.
He's not up for it.
He can barely pronounce his own name.
And so they're trying to set the stage to get Biden not to debate as they should because Joe Biden is now personally a little bit divorced from reality, but more broadly his party and his political worldview is very divorced from reality.
Now, ironically at this time of presidential candidates being separated from reality.
We've got a new entrance into the race.
Kanye West is running for president.
I've got to tell you, I read through his very long interview that he just gave to Forbes.
I kind of like candidate Kanye.
I know it sounds...
I unironically am pretty pro-Kanye.
I'm going to vote for Trump.
I'm not going to vote for Kanye in 2020.
But I've got to tell you, Kanye has a lot of good things to say politically.
Here's just the top line from the interview.
He says he's running for president in 2020 under a new banner, the Birthday Party.
That's the name of his political party, the Birthday Party, with guidance from Elon Musk and an obscure vice presidential candidate he's already chosen.
The vice presidential candidate is just a preacher, I think, from the Midwest.
Love that.
Oh, yeah.
Are you telling me you could pick either, like, some random congressman, some empty-suit sociopath, like most people choose for running mates or political appointments, or just a good old preacher from the heartland of America?
Sign me up, man.
I'm with Kanye.
He says that he's okay with siphoning off black votes from the Democratic nominee, thus helping Trump.
He says, I'm not denying it.
I just told you to say that the black vote is Democratic as a form of racism and white supremacy.
Damn right it is.
Absolutely.
The way that they're taught, you see this constantly, people attacking Kanye because he's stealing votes.
He's stealing black votes from Joe Biden, meaning Joe Biden owns those black voters.
Deborah Messing, the actress, said this just the other day.
So that's absolutely disgusting.
She said, quote, He's playing Jill Stein.
He's trying to take young black voters from Biden.
It's disgusting.
Biden doesn't own those voters.
Sorry, lady.
And Kanye West points that out.
Love that.
He says that he believes, quote, planned parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the devil's work.
Yup.
Preach, man.
Absolutely.
That's the most concise description of Planned Parenthood that I have heard.
And their political strategy of expansion into cities that I have ever heard from any American politician.
Now, he's wrong on China.
He kind of likes China, so that's bad.
And he wants to spring people from prison.
That's not good.
We don't like that very much.
But, you know, he's right on the Democrats.
He says...
This is a line of his, too.
Let's see if the appointing...
Is it 2020 or it's at 2024?
But God appoints the president.
If I win in 2020, then it was God's appointment.
If I win in 2024, then that was God's appointment.
What Kanye West is giving here, I know people think that sounds kooky and crazy.
This is just a description of what St.
Paul tells us in the scriptures.
And it's a description of what Edmund Burke describes about providence.
That there is an overarching providence to the world.
Great stuff.
I dig that.
He says that we need to pray.
We need to pray for freedom.
It's all about God.
And we need to stop doing things that make God mad.
Yeah, man, that's like my political philosophy.
Stop doing things that make God mad and pray.
And pray for your freedom.
Bingo, buddy.
Man, this guy's great.
I can't wait for this guy to run for president.
Maybe like 2024.
I don't necessarily want him to take over.
Oh, on abortion, I'm pro-life because I'm following the word of the Bible.
Oh, good stuff.
This is great.
On being a political novice, he says, I have to say with all humility that as a man I don't have all of the pieces in the puzzle.
He is humble.
It's one of these things, they say this with Trump too.
They say he's a narcissist, he's an egotist.
They say this about Kanye.
But when you get past the jokes, there is a certain humility here that is necessary, especially if you convert or revert to Christianity.
I mean, he goes on.
There's so many issues in this whole...
I strongly encourage you to read this piece.
There's one bit, too, I want to hit on.
There's one last bit at the end.
He was asked about his policies, and he says, I don't know if I would use the word policy for the way I approach things.
I don't have a policy when I went to Nike and designed Yeezy and went to Louis and designed a Louis Vuitton at the same time.
It wasn't a policy.
It was a design.
We need to innovate the design to be able to free the mind at the same time.
Yes, that's right.
That's my view of, I know, that's my view of politics, though.
We have been caught in this technocratic, egghead politics of just managing spreadsheets.
What Edmund Burke might have called the sophisters, economists, and calculators, who he derided.
And so Kanye comes in and he goes, yeah, I don't want all those stupid egghead things.
I've got a vision.
We've got to pray for our freedom.
We've got to do the right thing.
We've got to stop killing babies.
I think it's great.
It's terrific.
I look forward to the future Kanye run.
He even said in there, he goes, I'm not sure.
I don't have total clarity if it's 2020 or 2024.
If he runs in 2020, that's fine.
I think he's probably going to miss the filing deadline.
And, you know, I like Trump, so that wouldn't be.
But whatever, I don't care.
Even if he runs, that's fine by me.
All the libs think he's going to steal votes from Biden anyway, so whatever.
We'll let them get very upset about that for a few months.
But regardless of whether or not Kanye becomes president, I'm not willing to give my endorsement.
For President Kanye yet.
But regardless of whether or not he does, what he says about politics there has more sophistication and political wisdom than 100% of Democrats in terms of actually like a virtuous politics and really more than probably 70% of Republicans.
So I congratulate Kanye.
I think that's good.
Also on some good news for our politics, the Little Sisters of the Poor have just beaten Barack Obama.
It's amazing that Barack Obama would pick a fight with a group of nuns called the Little Sisters of the Poor.
But he did.
He pushed for his Obamacare law to force the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious groups to pay for abortion-inducing drugs and birth control in obvious violation of their conscience.
This was litigated and went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
It's been going on for years.
And we got a decision.
And luckily, actually, it wasn't even a...
5-4 decision.
It was a 7-2 decision.
So you had, I believe it was Sotomayor and RBG sided against the Little Sisters of the Poor because one of those is the least impressive member of the court and the other one is the most partisan member of the court.
And you had Kagan and Everyone else, but Kagan, probably the most notable liberal, go over and side with the Little Sisters of the Poor.
There's just no argument here.
I mean, it's not even close.
Obviously, the federal government should not force nuns to pay for abortion-inducing drugs.
The fact that this is even a religious question, though, should worry us.
The fact that the state religion of liberalism, of doing what you want, of if it feels good, do it, has this much sway over our religion, traditional religion, If you're a Christian, this could affect you if you're Jewish or Muslim.
The fact that they have this much sway over it is troublesome because it means this isn't over.
What the left understands that the right doesn't is that court decisions are not final.
They will keep relitigating them until they get the decision that they want.
A nice win for the short term, but we're going to have to rethink our conservative legal movement in the long term, I think.
But for today...
Let's be happy with the Little Sisters of the Poor.
And with the Little Sisters of the Poor and with Kanye, let's pray for freedom.
Because the state religion is pretty broad.
You know, there was this story that came up out of...
Canada.
So it's America's hat.
It's not in America, but it's similar ethos, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if we saw the same story in America.
In Canada, they painted a crosswalk in rainbow colors, not to remind man that God will never again destroy the earth in a flood, but to support sexual liberation and gay rights, but now it's so much more than just homosexuality.
They're very upset up in Canada.
The cops are investigating a major serious crime because they found tire marks in the crosswalk.
Pride crosswalk defaced outside West Vancouver Police Station.
They're looking for a black Ford Mustang with red racing stripes along the top and sides because there were tire marks in a crosswalk.
Have you ever seen tire marks in a crosswalk?
Probably you have.
Because you know what drives over crosswalks?
Of course.
You know what cars have?
Tires.
You know what happens when you hit the brakes?
You get tire marks.
But this is...
Any offense to part of the state religion, which is the rainbow, not the old rainbow, the new rainbow...
Is considered a hate crime.
The worst possible thing imaginable.
We saw yesterday two people are being charged in America with civil rights violations with hate crimes for painting over a Black Lives Matter Marxist slogan in the streets of a city.
That sort of thing, that's not going to have to go up to the Supreme Court.
These people are going to get the hammer laid down on them, whether it's in America or in Canada.
And the little sisters of the poor are going to have to wait and wait and fight and fight for years and years in court.
That is the religion of liberalism.
Even this is one story, I mentioned it a little bit yesterday on Ben's radio show, but I have to get to it before we get to the mailbag.
Single people right now, single people are having kids with strangers as part of a trend called co-parenting.
Now, you would think co-parenting is a man and a woman love each other very much.
They get married.
They call the stork hotline.
The stork brings them a baby.
They raise the baby together out of their love for each other.
But liberalism, as it always does, has inverted things.
So now, instead of bringing your love for another person into manifestly a love that is a person, and then you give your love to that little baby, now we only love ourselves, we are only out for ourselves, and everything is about giving us pleasure and giving us what we want.
So the story goes...
They're skipping love and marriage.
They're going straight to the part about a baby in a carriage.
Yelena Pranoza, 41-year-old accountant living in Staten Island, has an 18-year-old daughter, but that hasn't stopped her from yearning for a brother or sister for my daughter.
After her hubby of eight years made it clear he doesn't want any more kids, she split from him four years ago and turned to the internet for answers.
There is much that is wrong here, but basically what's come up is that people go on the internet and they say, it's like swiping right or left, but not for a romantic relationship, just to have a kid.
Much wrong with it.
Much is backwards.
First of all, you want a child to grow up in a stable, loving home, not with two random people who met one time and live in different places and maybe sort of know each other, but they're going to have a kid together.
You don't want to intentionally deprive a child of one of its natural parents, which is happening more and more these days.
You don't want to make the kid all about you.
That's the worst kind of parenting.
If you begin parenting that way, it's going to have miserable results.
That's what our culture has done.
We've made it all about us.
We've made it all about our own fantasies.
And you know what?
It's not.
It's made us all miserable.
You can see it in public opinion polls.
We're more anxious.
We're more stressed.
We're more suicidal than just about ever.
This is true across age groups.
It's truer of women than it is of men, even.
Men are committing suicide at higher rates, as they always do.
But women's happiness, as measured by various polls, has declined both in relative terms to men and in absolute terms over the past five decades.
Selfishness has made us miserable.
That living in a fantasy world has made us miserable.
And I think we might be at a breaking point.
I think we might be at one of these points that happens every so often, every few decades, maybe only every few centuries, where reality begins to reassert itself.
And people are waking up to that.
And that's an ugly thing.
When you wake up from a dream, when you wake up sleepwalking, things can go wrong.
It can be very jarring.
It can be very scary.
That may be the moment that we're in.
This election that we're talking about, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, that is one symbol.
It's a clear symbol of it too.
Which way are we going to go?
How are we going to wake up from this?
Is it going to be nightmarish or are we going to be happy to welcome ourselves finally back into reality?
That remains to be seen.
We will get to the mailbag in just one second.
First, though, I have got to thank all of you for heading over and subscribing on Apple Podcasts to The Michael Knowles Show.
And I've got to thank you for going and subscribing to The Michael Knowles Show YouTube channel.
And I want to thank all of you for going to my MySpace page, you know, because I hadn't seen that in probably like 15 years or so.
And so that's really cool, too.
Be sure to check out my chat with Donald Trump Jr.
on the YouTube page.
We spoke to him yesterday.
And we spoke to the man, the myth, the legend, Mark McCloskey.
He's the guy in St.
Louis with the gun outside his house in the pink polo shirt and the white chinos.
He's a hero.
He clears up a lot of misinformation that people are spreading about him.
Super cool guys.
So check that out.
Also get a Daily Wire reader's pass, 99 cents for your first month, three bucks a month after that.
You get lots of great insight going into the election.
So it's absolutely terrific.
Head on over to dailywire.com for that and buy Ben's book.
Head on over.
Ben has a new book out.
Ben writes a new book every, it seems 36 hours.
This is a terrific book.
It's how to destroy America in three easy steps.
He seems to have pre-visaged what is going on right now in this country.
People tearing things down.
He talks about the disintegrationists as our country is disintegrating.
So you can pre-order your signed copy at dailywire.com slash ben.
Get that today.
Head on over to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
First question from Josh.
Mr.
Knowles, why does the left seem to only discuss right-wing straw man arguments when discussing conservative positions?
Do they honestly not know conservative positions, or is it part of a strategy to discredit those more serious positions?
Thanks.
It's funny you should ask that.
I actually did not realize that that was going to be the first question in here, and it ties in exactly to our theme of the show, and it ties in exactly to Don Lemon.
I think it's two parts.
One, they genuinely don't know.
They actually don't know.
And two, they don't care.
If you live in the liberal worldview, in a liberal culture, with a liberal government, you are generally not very interested in leaving that ideological bubble.
Even if the ideology doesn't totally correspond to reality, you would be more interested in forcing that fantasy on the world and making it into a reality, which is a premise of liberalism.
We can do whatever we want to do.
We can liberate ourselves completely.
We can liberate ourselves from the confines of reality.
Then you are in understanding the other point of view.
But they don't know what we think.
A great example happened this week.
Ayn Rand was trending.
Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged.
Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead.
She was this kind of anarcho-capitalist type figure.
She wants very, very small government.
She just wants to build things.
She loved industrialism.
She was an atheist.
She was a rationalist.
And she was famously written out of the conservative movement.
When she came on the scene, some conservatives liked that she wanted to at least make a little money and save a little money.
Whitaker Chambers, William F. Buckley Jr., a lot of people said her vision of the world just has very little to do with the transcendent moral universe that conservatives believe in, and so that's not really what conservatism is.
But the left was dunking on the Ayn Rand Institute this week because they took government money, and they really thought that Ayn Rand was the representative of the conservative worldview, when really that isn't true.
If it ever was true, that's decades in the past now, and really I don't think it was true ever.
They're tilting at windmills.
They're fighting against straw men.
And it's why, by the way, they are always welcoming of squishy conservatives.
They invite squishy conservatives on their news channels.
The system actually needs the squishy conservatives to give legitimacy to the larger liberal project.
But you know who they don't like?
Conservatives who tell it like it is.
Conservatives who are a little too real.
Conservatives who speak their mind and puncture their ideology, who don't accept their premises.
They don't let those guys on their news channels Because those guys, rather than being a support for the system, are actually a major threat to the system.
And they don't want to hear it.
Maybe they don't know about it, but they sure don't want to hear it.
From Pasquale.
What a great name, Pasquale.
Dear Swarthi, Mr.
Knowles, I'm a big fan.
Also a registered nurse.
Now, I don't have as much medical or scientific knowledge or experience as our elected career politicians, so I was just wondering how wearing a surgical mask or face covering protects others, but not the person wearing one.
Many mask wearers aggressively attack people who don't wear one, but if spit droplets are not able to go out, wouldn't that also mean they can't go in either?
Or is that $1 bandana made of some magical one-way material?
P.S. I'm also an Italian-American and I'm extremely offended by your use of the word swarthy, which I'd never heard before.
I'm going to raise money to build a Michael Knowles statue, then knock it over because I'm bored and have nothing else to do.
Fair enough.
Totally understand.
That's the age we're living in.
You've got to build up statues just to knock them down.
On the point about the masks, of course, you're right.
Initially, people wear masks to protect themselves, generally speaking.
And that was one of the ideas early on in this coronavirus thing.
But they realized that if you're just wearing a mask to protect yourself then that gives you the right to decide whether or not to wear the mask.
Because in this country we still believe at least to a large degree that you have the right to take some risks yourself.
So they couldn't have that narrative continue because then no one would wear the masks and no one would be as freaked out about the lockdown.
And they couldn't push nationwide mail-in ballots and they couldn't lock Joe Biden in a basement and not have him make mistakes.
So there are many, many implications to these policies.
So what they had to do was say, it's actually not about you.
You have to wear the mask because if you don't wear the mask, you're killing grandma.
You're killing someone else.
It creates, it's much more effective at whipping up hysteria and it's much more effective at getting people to fall in line.
But it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense when reality reasserts itself as it does for some people in the end.
From Aaron, hi Michael, do you think religiosity will decline in America?
What do you think it would take for atheism to decline?
Thanks.
No, I don't think religiosity ever really declines, not in the long run.
I think religiosity just gets replaced by another religion.
So everybody's got to serve somebody.
That is a fact of life.
Man is fundamentally a religious being.
Our longings are not primarily just of the appetite, like I need coffee, I want this food, I want this drug, I want this sex.
We have those longings too, but we have deeper longings, more sustained longings, a longing that cannot be satisfied except with religion, except by God, what you would call the God-shaped hole in man's heart.
That is the most enduring, eternal, deepest longing.
And so when you, that has fulfilled, been fulfilled traditionally everywhere by religion, but in this enlightened liberal age, as people have seen it fashionable to become atheists, they just replace it with something else.
So they replace it primarily with political ideology, the ideology of liberalism or communism or fascism, or they replace it with some kind of modern spins on those ideologies like environmentalism, which has all of the hallmarks of religion, right?
It's got sin in pollution, redemption in recycling, the sale of indulgences in carbon tax credits.
It's got an entire order, a moral order that happens to have to do with the earth rather than the metaphysical world.
But you have to replace it with something.
And so I think there are a lot of squishy conservatives, the conservative liberals, you know, the classical liberals even, say, who believe that Really, what we need to do is create this separate space for me to practice my religion, but you're free not to practice any religion at all.
We're all good.
Nobody has anything to do with each other, and we'll be fine.
Leave me alone.
That's not how society has ever worked.
That's not how politics has ever worked.
Politics comes from the Greek polis, the city-states, where people live together.
That's what it's about.
How do we all live together?
And so it does have an effect.
We've got to get this kind of ideological, libertarian notion out of our minds that we have no effect on other people and other people have no effect on us.
We live in society.
We are social creatures.
That's how Aristotle defines man.
And when you're living in a culture that is avowedly atheist or liberal or environmentalist or whatever, that is going to have an effect on your religion.
They are going to come knocking on your door.
Ask the Little Sisters of the Poor about that.
They've been fighting this for years.
And they got a little mild win, but they're going to be fighting it for years more, I promise you.
So the key, it is not merely enough to leave everybody alone.
What we have to do, if you're Christian, is to follow the commission that you are given, which is to evangelize.
We need to persuade people of our ideas.
If we don't do that, if we're not winning, we're losing.
From Katie.
Hey Michael, I'm dating a liberal.
Here's your first problem.
Things started off fine, but more and more he's trying to empower me by insisting that I pick up the check at restaurants and open doors for him.
I don't think it'll work out, but I'm also confused about how to break up with him since he already encourages me to see other men in our relationship.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks.
I can't tell you if that letter is a joke or is serious.
That's how crazy our culture's gotten.
That I could see that being a joke.
You know, some conservatives wrote that in as a joke.
I could also see that being an article on Slate.
And I've read articles like that on Slate.
And I've heard experiences like that from my female friends who have dated liberals.
That's a very bad situation.
I guess, though, we're all focusing on the guy.
This liberal guy who has these crazy ideas of, you know, you should sleep with other men and you should pick up the tab.
But really, maybe you're the one who's got the craziness here.
Maybe you're the one who's got the mental problems.
You're the one dating the guy.
I think there's a lesson there for all of us.
We conservatives.
We're the ones going along with all this craziness.
We're the ones not fighting back.
All right.
One more question from Chris.
Hello, Michael.
I keep reading on places like Forbes and NPR that the recent spikes in coronavirus cases are not due to the recent protests, of course.
However, I just find that difficult to believe.
Are they just lying, omitting relevant information or what?
What is the cause of this recent spike?
Thanks.
Keep up the great work.
It would seem to me that if there is a spike in cases, it might have something to do with the hundreds of thousands of people around the country who were rioting for the past several weeks.
The fact that public health officials, quote unquote, want to tell you with a straight face that the virus can discriminate between political world views and it knows that it's going to attack and spread among the conservatives, but not among the leftists.
That is ridiculous.
And the people who say that have no credibility.
And the scientific establishment that's been wrong at every turn about this virus has no credibility.
I think the virus is in many ways, it only occurred to me actually doing this show today, the virus is in many ways one of these incidents that is hastening the final confrontation of at least this era between illusion, delusion, and reality.
Because we're looking around and we're saying, you told us two million people, two million Americans were going to die of this thing within weeks.
That didn't happen.
You told us flattening the curve was about You told us the hospitals would be overwhelmed.
That never happened.
You told us it was good to loot and riot for a Marxist organization.
You can't believe that stuff.
And I think the most enduring legacy of the Trump era will be cracking finally that patina of credibility that the mainstream media and the political establishment had.
They're not credible.
They don't deserve our credence.
They are no better at running this country than anybody else, including Kanye West.
And frankly, people like Kanye West seem to have much more promise than that desiccated liberal establishment of both parties.
That's how you get Donald Trump.
And I hope that's how you get another four years of Donald Trump.
All right, that's our show.
I have got Ben's radio show coming up tomorrow, so you can listen then.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Assistant director, Pavel Widowski.
Editor and associate producer, Danny D'Amico.
Audio mixer, Robin Fenderson.
Hair and makeup, Nika Geneva.
Production assistant, Ryan Love.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental and that's what this show is about.
