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July 16, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show

45:18

Ep. 581 - We Hardly Knew ‘Ye

Kanye drops out of the race, Trump dumps his campaign manager, and Twitter gets hacked. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Terrible news in the world of politics.
	The birthday party is over, at least for now.
	Kanye West has dropped out of the 2020 presidential race.
	And I have to tell you, as excited as I was and enthusiastic about Kanye's campaign, I had a feeling this might happen.
	Part of the reason that I had this feeling was that Kanye has released, to my On the campaign.
	And that statement did not exactly inspire confidence.
	Hey, what's up everybody?
	It's Jay.
	I'm here at the county clerk's office and I wanted to show you how I just registered to vote.
	See, that was the issue.
	The I just registered to vote, apparently for the first time, does not make me think that the campaign was in the best shape to get all the paperwork filed, do all the right campaigning, get everything in place.
	A lot of campaigns are up in the air right now.
	Jeff Sessions got wiped out in Alabama.
	Big shape-ups at the Trump campaign.
	Numbers from polling all over the place.
	Kanye, we hardly knew ye, but it's anybody's race.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	as the Michael Knowles Show.
	Welcome back to the show live.
	Lots going on specifically in politics.
	You know, very often we're talking about the culture and how the cultural issues are going to affect politics.
	Well, the effects are here.
	The campaigns are getting into high gear and some very important changes are being made.
	Before we get into that, I have to thank our friends over at Keeps.
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	Thank you.
	So, major shakeups beyond the Kanye presidential collapse.
	This on the Trump campaign, President Trump has ousted his campaign manager, Brad Parscale.
	He ousted Parscale and he promoted this guy named Bill Stepien.
	What does this mean?
	It means what we've known for a long time, which is that the Trump campaign was veering in the wrong direction and it needed to correct course.
	And it did correct course, not a moment too soon.
	We are now less than four months away from the presidential election, so these sorts of changes had to happen.
	You know, on this show, when I have criticized certain things that the White House or the campaign is doing, I like to point out that...
	Most likely it's that the president is getting bad advice.
	Now, I don't know if the problems were Parscale's fault.
	The issue, however, is that on a presidential campaign, the buck stops at the top.
	And so if there were problems even further down the line, it's that campaign manager's job to deal with those problems.
	And obviously, President Trump thought that Parscale would be in a better position elsewhere.
	The thing to know...
	And don't forget, in 2016, Trump shook up his campaign management constantly.
	You know, all these different names that came up.
	Corey Lewandowski, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway.
	They were all coming up.
	They were all churning the whole time.
	That's, in part, I think, how he was able to...
	To continue to improve his campaign.
	Just because you start out and it's a little weak doesn't mean you have to end that way.
	Brad Parscale, who was running the Trump campaign, was the campaign's digital director in 2016.
	And the Trump campaign did great on digital in 2016.
	But just because you can do one job on a campaign extraordinarily well does not mean that you can necessarily run a campaign extraordinarily well.
	In fact, in many ways, those are...
	Completely different jobs.
	You know, one is much more about management.
	The other is much more creative.
	So the guy he's replaced him with, this guy Bill Stepien, is a political veteran.
	And crucially, he's run a number of campaigns.
	And he ran Chris Christie's two successful gubernatorial campaigns.
	I'm pleased to see this change.
	No ill will toward Brad Parscale, but I'm glad to see that Trump is listening and realizes that things were not going as well as they should be.
	Because if the campaign, I think, were to continue in this way, he might be headed for an unhappy day in November.
	These things happen.
	Nobody is guaranteed to be re-elected.
	Nobody is guaranteed to get their seat back.
	Jeff Sessions learned this lesson the hard way down in Alabama.
	Jeff Sessions, who served in the Senate for, I think, 300,000 years.
	I mean, he was there for a very long time.
	He left to become Trump's Attorney General.
	Then Trump soured on him as Attorney General.
	He ran for his old seat again, and he lost.
	And he didn't lose just by a little bit.
	It was a pretty clear loss.
	Here is Sessions conceding.
	To the people of Alabama, I want to thank you for your support over the years.
	We've fought a good fight in this race, and we've taken our case to the people of Alabama, and the people of Alabama have spoken.
	They want a new leader, a new fresh face to go to Washington.
	I think we're going to have that.
	I love this state.
	It's been an honor beyond words for me to serve it.
	I want to congratulate Tommy Tuberville.
	He ran a really firm, solid race.
	He was focused on his goal and on winning.
	He had a plan to do so, and he was able to do so.
	He is our Republican nominee.
	We must stand behind him in November.
	So, a very gracious concession speech from Jeff Sessions.
	You know, increasingly in recent years, people don't want to actually admit that they lose elections.
	That's why you have Stacey Abrams as still the shadow governor of Georgia and all these sorts of things.
	People don't want to admit when they lose Hillary Clinton, still think she's the president.
	But Sessions has admitted this.
	This is good news for Trump.
	This signals that Trump's endorsement still has a fair bit of sway, at least in a bright red state like Alabama, because Trump, furious at Jeff Sessions's tenure as AG, came out very strongly for Tommy Tuberville.
	The reason I think why Sessions was so gracious about this is not only because he's a nice, polite man, but also because he got blown out of the waters.
	The race was not even close.
	Sessions won only three out of Alabama's 67 counties.
	Tommy Tuberville got 61% of the vote.
	That to Jeff Sessions' 39%.
	So what does it all mean for Trump?
	We don't know very much about Tommy Tuberville.
	We know a lot about Jeff Sessions.
	He was a very popular senator.
	But that Trump movement seems to have some influence.
	Nobody knows anything.
	So the minute that someone tells you this is exactly what's going to happen in November, immediately discount what they're saying.
	This is up in the air.
	I think this is the point about politics no one wants to admit, but it's the point that actually should give us the most hope, which is that nothing is inevitable.
	Okay, what the left wants you to believe is that...
	It's absolutely inevitable.
	The Democrat, Joe Biden, is going to win.
	In 2016, it was inevitable.
	Hillary was going to win.
	98% chance, 99% chance.
	And it's not.
	It's up in the air.
	It's politics.
	They have a ton of institutional power, but they don't have all of the power.
	We the people still have a lot of power.
	We can send them a message every so often.
	We can do it not just here.
	It happened in the Brexit vote.
	It's happened all around the West.
	There is some popular uprising.
	There is some popular power.
	And there is a poll out from Monmouth University Polling Institute, which is an independent polling institute, that shows very good news for Trump on this front.
	It shows that the people have more power and they're playing their cards a little closer to their chest than they might be letting on.
	The poll is a little bit complicated to read.
	The conclusions of the poll are a little bit complicated to get.
	But what it basically says is that people don't want to be honest with pollsters.
	People don't want to tell everyone that they're voting for Trump.
	And it's not just the same story we heard in 2016.
	That phenomenon has actually increased.
	It's been exacerbated.
	People are more likely to keep quiet about their support for Trump.
	Most registered voters, 54%, say they were surprised in 2016 when Trump ended up winning Pennsylvania's electoral votes.
	They currently are about divided on where Pennsylvania is going to go this time, 46% or 45%.
	One reason is that 57% believe there are a number of so-called secret voters in their communities who support Trump but won't tell anyone about it.
	And less than half that number, 27%, believe that there are secret voters for Biden.
	So realize, on a poll, you can't ask people...
	Are you a secret voter for Trump?
	Because by definition, if you tell the pollster that you're a secret voter for Trump, then you're no longer a secret voter for Trump.
	So the way the question is phrased is about other people.
	Do you believe that there are secret voters for Trump?
	And so our conclusions here are not totally firm.
	Consider the Black Lives Matter phenomenon, which is when someone uploads a black square to social media or someone uses the hashtag Black Lives Matter, what they're saying is that I believe Black Lives Matter, but a lot of people do not.
	However, everybody has used this phrase and everybody has said that Black Lives Matter, so that would be an example of people imagining that there are all these sort of phantoms out there, but realizing that actually there are not, right?
	I mean, you know, we have to see there are not...
	There's not a scourge of Klansmen running around the country.
	So the question with this poll is, are the people who are saying they believe there are a lot of secret Trump voters out there, is it just a delusion?
	Or do they have good reason to think there are the secret voters?
	I think it's the latter.
	I think this is good news for the Trump campaign.
	Because the fact is, everybody knows a Trump voter.
	And frankly, everybody knows a secret Trump voter who doesn't want to lose his job, who doesn't want to lose his career and his livelihood.
	This issue of punishment for support of Trump has increased over the last several years and certainly during these race riots.
	And the fact of the matter is that, you know, Trump did win.
	About half the country voted for him in 2016.
	So there are a lot of these people.
	Does not mean Republicans should get complacent.
	More good polling news.
	Rasmussen shows Trump has ticked up seven points nationally, narrowed Biden's lead to three points in recent days.
	So Joe Biden right now is at 47%.
	And among U.S. likely voters, Trump is at 44%.
	5% prefer another candidate and 4% are undecided.
	It's anybody's game.
	It's anybody's race.
	Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
	Don't let anybody intimidate you into giving up and staying home and being locked up, staying home whether because you're afraid to go outside and breathe the fresh air or staying home more specifically on politics because you don't feel that your vote will matter in the election.
	That is what the left is banking on.
	Now, there is a cultural aspect to all of this as well.
	The cultural has become absolutely insane, particularly on the subject of race.
	You thought Nick Cannon was bad yesterday talking about how white people are animals.
	A friend of his, an even more famous friend of his in the mainstream entertainment industry, came out and defended him.
	A little bit of a double standard.
	Kind of reminds me, probably not a whole lot of white supremacy going on.
	We'll get to that in one second.
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	The culture has become nuts, particularly on race.
	I think that's why people are now even less likely to admit that they're willing to vote for the Republican candidate.
	There's been so much racial demagoguery.
	We had the Nick Cannon talk yesterday where Nick Cannon said white people are savages and barbaric and soulless and animals.
	Well, Puff Daddy, P-Diggity-Doo Dad, is coming out and defending him.
	P-Diddles tweeted out, quote, Nick Cannon has come home to Revolt TV, truly black-owned.
	We got your back and love you and what you have done for the culture.
	We are for our people first, for us, by us.
	Let's go.
	So the stuff that Nick Cannon said yesterday is pretty disgusting stuff about how terrible white people are, how they don't have souls, about how you get power from melanin in your skin because white people don't have that.
	They're animals.
	And now you've got an even more mainstream guy, P. Diddy, coming out and defending that.
	Imagine if this were reversed.
	Imagine if a popular white musician tweeted at...
	I don't know, Richard Spencer or David Duke or somebody and said, David Duke, come home to Revolt TV. Truly white owned.
	Yes, with a thumbs up, you know, white thumbs up emoji.
	We got your back.
	We love what you do and what you've done for the culture.
	We are for white people first.
	For us, by us, let's go.
	Probably that wouldn't go over very well, would it, in the culture?
	And yet we are told this lie that we are living in a white supremacist nation.
	Of course that is not the case.
	We've gone over this on this show many other times.
	There's one aspect of our law that is still racially discriminatory as a matter of law.
	That is called affirmative action, and that disadvantages, doesn't advantage, it disadvantages white people and Asian people, particularly on university admissions, which is why a group of Asian students sued Harvard University.
	That's it.
	That's the only one.
	If you're told that there is white supremacy by law, you are being lied to, and even in the culture.
	No sort of Nonsense like this, if it were posted by white people, would ever be tolerated.
	You would lose your life, you would lose your livelihood, without question.
	We're for our people for something like that.
	Crazy.
	And yet, we are living under this delusion, actually, that these polls about how people think one thing, and they think other people think another thing, and they think other people think that other people think another thing.
	We're all trying to guess where everybody is Because we are living in a properly ideological vision, and the ideology is disconnected from the reality in many cases.
	So, you're going to see more of this.
	This is increasingly what politics is going to become about.
	You're already seeing it in Asheville, North Carolina.
	Asheville, North Carolina, first place in the country to now officially vote for reparations for slavery.
	Asheville voted 7-0.
	So a total unanimous vote at the city council to formally apologize to black residents for the city's role in slavery and other racist policies throughout history.
	I guess the residents, maybe they thought that the town was happy about slavery or something, so they had to issue this formal apology 150 years after the abolition of slavery.
	And the measure calls to provide reparations to black residents in the form of investments in their community, such as increasing minority home ownership, increasing minority business ownership, and career opportunities.
	Now, obviously, this is racial discrimination because you're giving certain advantages to people based on the color of their skin.
	So, it's certainly not white supremacy, but we have seen this kind of thing before.
	Particularly in affirmative action and similar policies.
	But it should be noted that this is not what people mean by reparations.
	The black residents of this town are not going to get direct payments.
	It's just going to be another welfare program.
	It's just going to be another affirmative action program, the likes of which we've seen for the past 50 years, none of which have worked.
	We're just going to get more of the same.
	One marketing piece of genius that we've seen from the left in recent years is they are repackaging their old stupid policies that don't work.
	They're just repackaging them and making them seem fresh and new.
	None of these programs, forget even race for a moment, the Green New Deal, none of these giant government programs are anything really new.
	They are just vast expansions of policies that were already in place.
	Just regular old welfare programs, regular old power grabs by people who are exploiting our fears on the sun monster, you know, the environment or race or whatever.
	And probably we can expect the same results again.
	But now we're all focused on race and the results of it.
	If you are living in the ideology, if you are living in the world in which the Klan is running around and towns are still happy about slavery 150 years later and we have white supremacy, then...
	You don't notice the absurdity, but if you're a normal person, you do.
	There was a new set of guidelines that was just put out by the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
	It was describing aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture.
	Do you know what the National Museum of African American History and Culture believes to be explicitly and exclusively white cultural aspects?
	Individualism.
	That's the first one.
	Family structure.
	Having a mother and a father is white.
	Apparently black people, they don't have that.
	The scientific method.
	I'm not joking.
	They put this out there.
	Science is white.
	I guess shamanism or something.
	Soothsaying would be black or for other people of color.
	But white people have a stranglehold on science.
	History.
	History is an aspect of whiteness and white culture.
	The Protestant work ethic.
	Working, like getting up and doing your job, that is now exclusively a white cultural aspect, according to this African American Museum.
	Religion, believing in Christianity, that is exclusively white.
	Perhaps they should read the book.
	Imagine what's going to happen when they read the Gospels.
	Future orientation.
	So planning ahead for the future.
	That's white.
	Black people can't do that, I guess.
	They're just stuck in the eternal present.
	Time.
	Time is listed on here as exclusively white.
	Aesthetics.
	Like beauty.
	Beauty is white.
	I can't...
	I actually cannot believe...
	I cannot allow myself to believe that this was put out seriously by...
	By a nominal group of African American, the National Museum of African American History.
	Is David Duke running the National Museum of African American History?
	Is this like a Richard Spencer joke project?
	Holidays, justice, competition.
	All white.
	Crazy.
	That's crazy.
	And very offensive to black people.
	But when you're stuck in this kind of ideological framework, you can't notice that.
	In this world...
	Even mainstream reporters are asking, even in interviews with the President of the United States, this kind of madness, this sort of thing.
	Do you believe that Black Lives Matter?
	Asking the President of the United States.
	Do you condemn the police who are killing all these black people?
	Which, by the way, isn't happening.
	Not happening at all.
	So, in that world, President Trump, mainly alone, possibly alone among his contemporaries, is willing to stand up and reject the premise.
	Let's talk about George Floyd.
	You said George Floyd's death was a terrible thing.
	Terrible.
	Why are African Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?
	And so are white people.
	So are white people.
	What a terrible question to ask.
	So are white people.
	More white people, by the way.
	more white people.
	A lot of people are criticizing Trump for this response.
	I actually kind of liked this response.
	It wasn't the perfect one.
	I think the perfect response would have been to reject the premise about the cops to say, actually, the cops aren't killing that many people.
	There are very few officer involved killings every year and they are not targeting black people.
	And you know, you can get to the second part about how a lot of more white people are being killed by the cops.
	And you get to that second, I think he could have gone further and just rejected the whole thing about the cops and just defended the blue.
	But I do at least like the point, That he's not playing into this fiction that black people are being hunted down all around the country by racist police.
	That is a fiction.
	The idea that individualism and family and Christianity and science and history and working are exclusively white, that is a fiction.
	The idea that we're living in a white supremacist culture is a fiction.
	The idea that melanin gives you power and that white people are animals and savages is a fiction.
	It's a lie.
	No one should give any quarter to this.
	We've talked a lot on this show about how you cannot stand in the middle on these issues These are very clear issues.
	If you stand in the middle of the road, you are going to get hit by a truck.
	We're in an election year.
	You need clear messaging, clear positioning.
	If you stand in the middle of the road, you are going to get run over by the people who are running against you.
	So President Trump, you can criticize his response and say, oh, it wasn't quite politic.
	He could have massaged it this way.
	That's fine.
	But at least he is rejecting this fictional racial narrative that is being pushed.
	The culture has become insane.
	Beyond race.
	You know, race is the hot topic right now.
	But it's become insane on sex, too.
	I meant to get to this earlier in the week, but I'm glad we can get to it now.
	This seems like a trivial story.
	This seems like it doesn't matter.
	But it has wide-ranging effects on the whole culture, and therefore on our politics.
	Will and Jada Smith.
	Will Smith and Jada Smith married for a long time.
	They've said they're not getting divorced.
	They've got a solid marriage.
	Let's just come out that Jada Smith was dating some other guy during their marriage.
	And so on Jada's show, her social media show, The Red Table, Will Smith came down and they talked openly about infidelity within their marriage.
	We decided that we were going to separate for a period of time, and you go figure out how to make yourself happy, and I'll figure out how to make myself happy.
	Well, at that particular point in time, it was indefinite.
	Yeah.
	I really felt like we could be over.
	Yeah.
	No, we were over.
	And then what did you do, Jada?
	What?
	You know, I think from there, you know, as time went on, I got into a different kind of entanglement with August.
	One thing I want to get clear about and clean up, one of the things that was kind of swirling in the press about you giving permission, which is...
	You know, the only person that can give permission in that particular circumstance is myself.
	Yes, exactly.
	Yeah.
	But what August was probably trying to communicate, because I could actually see how he would perceive it as permission because we were separated amicably.
	And I think he also wanted to make it clear that he's not a homewrecker, which he's not.
	Oh my gosh, this is so awkward, and most of what she just said is not true.
	I mean, she's right that she had this affair with this guy, but her conclusions about that are not true.
	But it's so awkward to watch this.
	I don't want to watch Will Smith admitting to being a cuckold on camera, and yet he's willing to do that, and it's engrossing stuff.
	And in many ways...
	We can give these people some respect for coming out and addressing these rumors that have been swirling about infidelity within the marriage, particularly Jada Smith's infidelity.
	And so you give them a little bit of credit for confronting this head-on, but it is so, so awkward.
	And it's based on a misunderstanding of family, right?
	She says in here, one of the rumors was that Will Smith gave this guy, August, permission to sleep with his wife.
	And she's saying, that's not what happened.
	And by the way, you wouldn't be the one to give permission.
	I would be the only one who could give permission.
	That's not true.
	When you are married, and the wife wants to go sleep with some other guy, she does not have the right.
	She is not the one who can do that.
	And I guess her husband could give permission, but he shouldn't.
	No, this is not, sorry guys.
	This kind of hyper-individualism, this total focus on the self, is extraordinarily destructive.
	A lot of what we're seeing here typifies leftist culture, particularly on sex and marriage.
	But there was a little glimmer of hope at the end, a kind of ironic glimmer of hope, which is the conclusion that they made, which is that they're not going to get divorced.
	You expect to be with somebody for a lifetime.
	25 years and counting.
	We ride together.
	We die together.
	Bad marriage for life.
	Bad marriage for life.
	It's obviously a reference to bad boys.
	Ride together, die together.
	Bad boys for life.
	Bad marriage for life.
	There's something actually to be said about that.
	In most of modern culture, they would just get divorced.
	The minute any trouble happens, you just split up and you remarry.
	The Smiths have been interesting because they won't do that.
	Even though, obviously, they've fallen prey to the same sort of troubles that happen throughout Hollywood and really happen to a lot of marriages anyway.
	So there's something really admirable there.
	You're seeing a reaching for a kind of more traditional culture.
	The things that typify leftist culture here is this insistence on being transparent.
	You notice this reading the leftist intellectuals throughout history.
	They always want to be really transparent, particularly about sex.
	A lot of, you know, Karl Marx and Rousseau and a lot of these people want to be very transparent about their sexual exploits.
	They want to hear about their sexual partner's exploits.
	This is a weird thing.
	Conservatives don't want to do that.
	Just like, ah, don't tell me about your past.
	I don't want to hear about your ex-boyfriend or your ex-girlfriend.
	Just shut up.
	Let's move on now.
	But they want to be very transparent.
	I think part of this is because they live by ideology, which is supposed to be universally applicable, and they're living basically only on their reason, not on their gut.
	You can see Will Smith, he doesn't look happy to be hearing about his wife's relationship with this guy, and yet he's still listening to it and putting it on camera here.
	I think if we couldn't correct this problem of selfishness, of always needing to be happy all the time, of following our individual appetites all the time, if we can fix that part and we can keep, maybe learn a lesson from this idea of, you know, good marriage, bad marriage, we're in a marriage, we're not going to split up.
	That could be a path forward because It seems like a trivial story, but the building block of society is the family, is the marriage.
	That's why the left attacks it as often as it does.
	If you don't have working marriages, you won't have a working society, you won't have a working politics.
	There's actually something to be learned, even from the obviously dysfunctional marriage of Will and Jada Smith.
	Probably we're going to get a lot of information about dysfunctional marriages soon, too, because Twitter was hacked yesterday.
	Even some of the biggest accounts, Joe Biden, Tesla, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Kanye West, looks like Obama, Bloomberg, and Bezos may have been affected, too, totally took over these accounts.
	accounts, probably some nefarious actor, state or private, has access to a lot of DMs.
	We'll see.
	There will probably be a lot more transparency coming out soon as well.
	And speaking of private messages, you've sent me your mailbag questions.
	We will get to them in just one second, but I've got to thank All of you for subscribing to the show on Apple Podcasts and on YouTube.
	Be sure to check out exclusive content posted on that channel, like my interview with Dave Rubin, which was just very recent.
	Also, Ben's got a new book.
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	We'll be right back with the mailbag.
	Welcome back to the mailbag, our first sponsored mailbag.
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	All right, let's jump right in from Ryan.
	Hi, Michael.
	I was talking to a leftist friend of mine who said that the polls in 2016 weren't wrong.
	Hillary did have a 99% chance of winning, but Trump just hit that 1% likelihood.
	Ha ha.
	Before I go insane, can you tell me that leftists deep down don't believe anything they say and that they don't really trust the mainstream media this blindly?
	No, they do.
	I mean, this is the issue with polling is you're always right.
	Whatever happens, you can always be right.
	And you can always defend your wrong predictions by saying, well, that was just, I believe, part of the lower chance, and it did work.
	Then you look in the various states and they'll say, look, Trump, he really barely won.
	He didn't even really win.
	Just, you know, 100,000 votes go this way in one state, 100,000 votes go that way in another state, and that's why he won.
	Yep.
	Uh-huh.
	That's what the polls are supposed to tell us.
	And then, moreover, you know, there weren't polls that said 99% of people are going to vote for Hillary Clinton.
	Where we got this 99% number is there were a lot of analyses of this poll, of all of these polls, that said, okay, looking at all the polls, seems 97% or 99% likely.
	That Donald Trump will lose.
	Say, well, I guess that 1% number came in.
	It's very difficult to trust these polls, particularly now.
	We mentioned earlier, people are just afraid to talk to pollsters.
	So, you know, the polling matters in as much as the campaign should be paying attention to this and not getting complacent at all.
	But if you're actually going to, you know, if you're going to bet the house on something you read in the polls, I think you'd probably be a foolish gambler.
	From Jack, Michael just signed up for the Daily Wire so I could tell you this.
	A couple weeks ago, my wife's cousin in L.A. went to get tested for COVID. He filled out the paperwork and waited over three hours before deciding to leave.
	Then a few days later, he got a call from the clinic telling him he tested positive for COVID-19.
	He was never tested.
	I thought it was crazy, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt.
	Maybe a clerical error until I told my good friend here in Texas about what happened, and he said, you're not going to believe this.
	T, our mutual friend, told me the exact same thing happened to him.
	He also got that phone call telling him he tested positive for COVID, even though he had left the clinic before getting tested.
	Question.
	Would you consider these isolated incidents a smoking gun or just a coincidence?
	I always thought COVID numbers were skewed.
	How can I believe any data at this point?
	Your newest fan came for Ben, stayed for the covfefe.
	Yeah, this is a...
	Thanks for sending in that story.
	Because obviously...
	We're looking for data here, but the plural of anecdote, given often enough, is data.
	And we do know that there has been a lot of madness.
	I mean, people who have been shot and died from gunshot wounds have been listed as COVID deaths.
	And there have been lots of different tests for COVID, and there's been a lot of contradictory information that's come out from the so-called public health experts and the mainstream media.
	And we know that this has been extraordinarily politicized.
	And we also know that medical providers are receiving more money in the form of government funding based on their work with COVID patients.
	So I don't know if any of these particular examples you're using are accurate or if they're misunderstood or if there's confusion, but surely the basic thing we can say here is that when you're looking at the COVID reporting, you need to be skeptical.
	Does that mean there's some nefarious, super-duper conspiracy?
	Maybe.
	There could be.
	The reason that conspiracy theories catch on is because every so often, there are conspiracies.
	You hear these conspiracies about...
	I remember I used to reject this completely outright.
	They'd say, there's a conspiracy out there that a bunch of Elite, wealthy, powerful people in government, heads of state, the royal family.
	There are pedophiles among them, and they have this pedophile ring.
	And I'd say, oh yeah, that's so ridiculous.
	Oh my gosh, Jeffrey Epstein!
	That's so crazy.
	So every so often, that's how the crazier theories propagate.
	So I don't know what's happening with COVID. All I can caution you is you ought to be skeptical.
	And the people who try to shame you and bully you for being skeptical of what you're hearing on any particular given day from the medical establishment that maybe they're going to change their mind on in two days, the people who are bullying you about that are probably the least to be trusted of anybody.
	From Josh, Dear Mr. Knowles, what if we try actually putting the left on defense by calling cancel culture the KKK, cancel culture club, would this end the movement?
	No, no, it wouldn't.
	It's kind of funny.
	I mean, I get a kick out of it, but it would not end anything.
	Republicans have tried this strategy for at least the past couple of decades, maybe longer, which is to respond to the baseless charges of racism by saying Democrats are the real racists.
	I'm the least racist.
	You're the most racist.
	As if this would shame the Democrats into either changing their mind or cutting out the baseless attacks.
	It won't.
	They don't care.
	First of all, they've redefined racism to just mean whatever they think.
	So racism, which once had a meaning, this idea of discriminating against people, being harsh against people, attacking people based explicitly on the color of their skin, now has been transformed to anything white people do.
	Anything white people do is racist.
	And by the way, when black people...
	Exhibit racism that's not racist, because they're black.
	I mean, that's just the Nick Cannon example.
	So the word no longer means anything other than something a leftist doesn't like, and so you're not going to be able to convince them, and I don't think they're interested anyway.
	Republicans, God bless them, they still think that we're in an era 30 years ago where you could have some kind of reasonable debate.
	That's not what's going on.
	We are in a bare-knuckle brawl for our government, for our politics.
	The left has admitted this.
	I mean, they now deny objective truth, right?
	They're saying another one of these sheets about white culture said that objective truth is a white concept.
	Science.
	This one says science is a white concept.
	So, you're not going to be able to deal with an American left that denies the universality of reason and truth, right?
	This election in November is not going to be about convincing these people in the middle.
	I don't think that's what it's about.
	I think it's going to be much more like the George Bush 2004 re-election campaign.
	It's going to be about turning out the base.
	You've got to turn out the base.
	And that's all we're going to do.
	Rather than try to argue and convince people on the other side that you're not a terrible person.
	You have got to rally and encourage your own side.
	From Sean, I saw quite possibly the most leftist article from 12 News in Arizona today.
	The headline was, Will Christmas be called off by COVID-19?
	Do you think they have a chance of taking Christmas from us too?
	Or will it wear off before then?
	Thank you for all that you do.
	They've been trying to take Christmas away from us since the first Christmas.
	Let's not forget, King Herod was trying to take Christmas away.
	He was chatting with those magi, trying to figure out a way to snuff out the first Christmas before it had barely begun.
	We've had the war on Christmas here, which the left mocks as though it didn't exist.
	Meanwhile, they rename all the Christmas trees holiday trees, and they take Merry Christmas out of public marketing, and they make it about season's greetings.
	So they all engage in that.
	They've been trying to do that for many years.
	And now, sure, they are certainly going to try to shut down travel and not have people go visit their relatives for Christmas.
	You know, it's important to fight back against this culture, and we want to have a politics and a culture that are safe for Christianity, for the exercise of religion.
	But we should also acknowledge, while we're doing that, that the popular culture, this world, the prince of darkness of this world, has always been trying to stop that.
	And so, you know, you shouldn't just complain and whine and despair about it.
	You should fight back and try to make a better culture and politics for the religion.
	But You know, it sort of was ever thus.
	From Chris.
	Cigar Master Knowles.
	If a nine-year-old can have the agency to change their gender, then wouldn't a nine-year-old have the agency to make the choice to go back to school, according to leftist logic?
	Of course, but it goes actually further than that.
	The left's argument on transgender children is cutting against their argument about liberal adults.
	You know, one thing we've heard in recent years about the campuses is that there's an epidemic of rape and one in four women are going to be raped, which would make Harvard yard more dangerous for women than Fallujah.
	I don't think anybody really believes that that is the case.
	What they're talking about is, well, college kids drink and then they go hook up.
	You know, they have these kind of increasingly, you know, clinical sexual interactions that, you know, because of free love and sexual liberation, this is just to be expected.
	And then sometimes the next morning, one or more of the parties will have regret, and then they'll say, that was rape.
	You know, I was drunk, or I didn't want to do that, or even though I did want to do that, now I don't want to do that.
	So what they're effectively saying is that a nine-year-old has...
	Sufficient mental faculties to make life-changing sexual decisions.
	But a 22-year-old does not have the mental faculties to make temporary sexual decisions.
	A 9-year-old has the mental faculties to permanently alter his body chemistry in a way that can never be corrected.
	But a 22-year-old woman can't have a one-night stand.
	That doesn't make any sense.
	But the left has to preserve the cult of sexual liberation.
	The left has to preserve the cult of individual autonomy, maximizing individual autonomy.
	And the left has to preserve the cult of feminist victimhood.
	You can't have all of those at once.
	The trans issue is just such a wedge here, because the left has told us for years and years that homosexuals are born that way, and no one should tell them to suppress their desires, and how dare you?
	A man loving another man sexually is totally natural and actually inescapable, and who would choose this?
	And also, there's no such thing as men or women.
	Well, if there's no such thing as men or women, if there's no such thing as objective sex, immutable sex, then there's no such thing as homosexuality.
	Homosexuality requires there to be immutable sexes.
	They haven't dealt with that and I'm not holding my breath for them to deal with that.
	It's just another incoherent aspect of their ideology that's not going to probably change through reasoned debate.
	They're just using it as a political cudgel.
	From Nick, austere religious podcaster.
	I saw that you and the Lord of the Multiverse, Andrew Klavan, did a review of Hamilton.
	I was wondering if you will be doing other reviews on similar topics such as movies and TV shows.
	I'm asking because I was unable to watch the musical Hamilton since I'm both a man and straight.
	Thank you.
	I guess that relates to the previous question as well.
	Uh, Yes, I hope so.
	I had a great time doing that with Drew because we just went over and smoked cigars and had a good time, which we do anyway.
	Let me know in the comments if there's something in the culture you think we should watch.
	I need a new show anyway.
	It's been a long week for a lot of people, long several weeks, long several months.
	We're now 122 days since we were told 15 days to slow the spread.
	Some of us knew it wasn't really going to be 15 days anyway.
	So that's all we're doing, trapped in our homes, watching TV, unless we take the opportunity before us.
	We realize that politics is not inevitable, the political outcomes that the left wants, that we can actually change our political future if only we have the courage to act.
	That's our show.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	See you Monday.
	If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
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	Supervising Producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
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	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
	You know, the Matt Wall Show is 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.

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