Big tech becomes even more like Big Brother, Biden continues to enjoy his year-long weekend at Bernie's, and male feminists continue to show how creepy they really are.
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It's the challenge where women just post selfies of themselves on Instagram as though that were challenging.
Well, it turns out That all of us may be inadvertently participating in the Instagram challenge because it turns out Instagram might be spying on us all the time.
People found this out because of an update to the iOS on their smartphones, on their Apple.
So they download iOS 14 beta and it shows you with a little indicator light whenever your phone camera is being accessed by apps that maybe you didn't think were accessing your phone's camera.
And as users are scrolling through Instagram, they see the light come on.
I hope you're looking hot.
I hope you're posing for your challenge.
Now, Instagram denies all this.
You see, it was just a big misunderstanding.
There's a little problem with the code.
There's nothing to worry about.
We're totally not spying on you all the time everywhere.
Well...
If you believe that, my friends, I think I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Big Tech has got a lot of power.
A lot, a lot of power.
They were dragged in front of Capitol Hill yesterday.
We will examine their testimony and examine why we all need to turn off, tune out, and drop in.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Where does the power really exist in the United States?
Forget even just political power.
The power to look at you, listen to you, push you in certain directions, figure out what kind of information you're seeing.
That's a lot of power.
And I think it's time to take some of that back.
First, though, we've got to thank our friends over at Rock Auto.
You know, it can be very frustrating.
It can take hours just to get a simple thing fixed on your car.
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that makes the whole process very simple and reliably inexpensive.
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Best of all, prices at rockauto.com are always reliably low and the same for professionals and do-it-yourselfers.
Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
Like, for instance, if you get me.
You know, I go into a brick-and-mortar auto parts store.
They think, there's my mark.
There's a guy who doesn't know anything about cars.
I'm going to go online and order the part, then it's going to come in later, I'm going to charge them double.
Probably they ordered it from rockauto.com.
Well, I'll tell you, the Rock Auto catalog is so easy to navigate, even I can do it, which is shocking.
It's unbelievable.
Go to rockauto.com right now, see all of the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, in their How Did You Hear About Us box, so that they know that we sent you.
Although probably in the future, we're not even going to have to do any of that.
Because the big tech oligarchs are going to know where we are all the time.
They're going to know what we're thinking.
They're going to read our thoughts.
You know, we all have these stories of how creepy it's getting with our smartphones.
For instance, when the lockdown was actually in place and if you wanted to violate it, you could only go to a few friends' houses.
I found out, sweet little Lisa and I, basically were only going to one friend's house every Saturday night.
And you start going a few times and then eventually, maybe after the third or fourth time, I look at my phone.
It gets to be four or five o'clock.
They say, hey, Michael, are you ready to go to Jonathan's house?
Here's the It's 40 minutes to this address and you think, oh my gosh, you know where I am all the time.
You can predict where I'm going.
And actually, in recent years, big tech has disabled some features that were scaring people into realizing how much they know about us, how much they can predict what we're doing.
The trouble is, look, we all hate politicians, right?
But at least our politicians have some accountability to us.
Politically, under the law, Big tech, I'm not so sure about that.
I don't know that big tech has our interests at heart.
I don't think big tech has our personal interests at heart.
I don't think big tech has our national interests at heart.
I think they have, with maybe one exception, very, very, very little loyalty to the United States, the country that allowed their companies to thrive.
So the CEOs yesterday of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon were hauled in front of Congress They were asked for testimony.
They got to give a little bit more testimony than Bill Barr did two days ago.
Specifically though, they were asked if they think China is stealing from US firms.
Very simple question.
Do you believe China steals US technology?
We all know that's true.
We've known that's true for decades.
We've all admitted that that is true for decades.
So can these zillionaire oligarchs, some of whom rely on Chinese slave labor to build their products, Can those CEOs admit what China's up to?
For most of them, absolutely not.
I don't know of specific cases where we have been stolen from by the government.
So you don't believe that the Chinese government's stealing technology from U.S. companies, or you're just saying that not from yours?
I'm saying I know of no case on hours where it occurred, which is I can only speak to first-hand knowledge.
Mr.
Pichai, do you believe that the Chinese government steals technology from United States companies?
Congressman, I have no first-hand knowledge of any information stolen from Google.
Mr.
Zuckerberg?
Congressman, I think it's well documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies.
Thank you.
Mr.
Bezos, you're on mute.
Mr.
Bezos, I believe you're on mute.
I'm sorry.
I have heard many reports of that, and I haven't seen it personally, but I've heard many reports of it.
So even beyond their answers to that, I love that the CEO of the largest company ever, practically, Amazon, doesn't know how to unmute his microphone when he's giving congressional testimony.
That just, that's perfect.
Of all those guys, starts out with Tim Cook, moves on to Sundar Pichai at Google, then Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, then finally Jeff Bezos at Amazon.
Only one of them Was willing to admit that China steals U.S. technology, which we've all known for years.
You've got to give credit where credit's due to Mark Zuckerberg.
Of all these guys, Zuckerberg is far and away the best of them.
He is the most defensible.
And I've got a lot of problems with Facebook, but at least this guy is willing to say...
He seems actually kind of shocked when he hears the other CEOs.
He goes, excuse me?
Yeah, I think we can admit, right, that China's stealing our tech.
Like, we know, like, why are we trying...
The rest of these guys, they're like a bunch of perps who just got caught.
They say, I have no first-hand knowledge.
I have none.
What are you...
China?
No, China's good.
We love you, Xi Jinping.
Keep giving us those slaves to build our products.
We love you.
Ha ha.
Yeah, we hate Hong Kong.
Yeah, it's pathetic.
It's pathetic.
And there are...
There are two angles to this.
One is we need our companies to be patriotic.
There is nothing conservative about allowing companies that have thrived in your country to transcend all bonds of loyalty to your country.
And in some cases, to actively undermine your country.
There's nothing conservative.
I know conservatives have kind of bought into this idea that...
We need to support corporate America at all costs.
Corporate America is terrible, okay?
Corporate America, maybe more than any institution other than the higher education apparatus, Is pushing America to the left because all they care about is the almighty dollar.
There's nothing conservative about chasing the almighty dollar for itself.
And that's it.
Just make money, money, money, money without any higher end in sight.
There's nothing conservative about that.
It's very modern.
It's very lib.
It's very left-wing to do that.
It's very materialist to do that kind of thing.
And we should not tolerate it.
But the bigger point here, beyond all of that, is these guys have too much power.
Whether or not Instagram is actually spying on you, maybe it is just a bug in the system.
It could be.
What do I know?
I haven't looked into the code.
Probably, though, I don't think that's the case.
Probably a lot of these apps are spying on us a lot of the time, and even if the apps aren't, people can hack in pretty easily.
And these guys, these big tech oligarchs, are controlling the apparatus with which they do that.
They have too much power, they're unaccountable, they've bought off much of Congress, of both parties, and they need to be reined in.
It's not even just the companies themselves.
Our reliance on technology, on the digital world, is making us susceptible to all sorts of deception, even outside of the digital world.
Right now there's a major push by the left to try to steal this election by pushing nationwide mail-in ballots.
The left has been caught red-handed using mail-in ballots and other schemes as a means of voter fraud for a very long time.
They've been doing it forever.
Actually, in one of the biographies of LBJ, FDR jokes to LBJ about how you've got to remember to steal some ballots and play with the vote tally at the end if you want to win elections.
There's nothing new about that.
What is new is Americans thinking that it's normal to be able to just 100% of people vote by mail and nothing is going to happen there.
There's a reason that we have polling places.
There's a reason we have an election day.
There's a reason that we have ballot security people show up at these polling places because people are trying to manipulate you.
People are trying to steal your vote.
People are trying to suppress your vote.
And there's something that feels very good.
It makes us feel very secure in putting in our ballot at a polling station.
Many conservatives have been disfranchised before.
This has happened to me personally.
I voted in a primary, and then magically, for some reason, I was kicked off the voter roll for the general election.
We all know people have these stories.
So you want to make sure your ballot is secure.
Well, a...
Local CBS affiliate in New York took on a little experiment to see just how secure mail-in ballots are.
The results will terrify you.
But first, got to thank our friends over at LifeLock.
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A lot of people spying on you.
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This time, maybe more than ever, a lot of us are susceptible to invasions of our privacy and even identity theft.
LifeLock.com slash Knowles.
So a CBS affiliate in New York does a little experiment.
They take a hundred ballots, they put them in the mail, they're mock-up ballots, and they send them to a P.O. box that they've registered for this experiment.
Everyone's vote gets counted, right?
Everything's totally fine, hunky-dory?
Not quite.
If you know how to mail a letter, you already know how to mail in your vote.
How you doing?
Thank you very much.
But how long might it take for that vote to actually arrive and be counted?
You're welcome.
Have a good afternoon.
We decided to test it, sending 100 mock ballots simulating 100 voters from locations all across Philadelphia to a P.O. box we set up to represent a local election office.
A couple days later, we mailed 100 more using the same size envelopes and the same class of mail as real ballots here.
To approximate the weight, we even folded mock votes into every one.
In the following week, we checked our P.O. box for the results.
Mail pickup notice, there's more.
When we went to collect everything, though...
Most of our votes seem to be lost.
That's all I have back there right now.
You're short, huh?
You're totally short.
I believe in you.
All right, have a good day.
Okay, take care.
So, it turned up short.
I also should point out, I pulled a little bit of a Joe Biden there.
I thought it was from New York, but it was from Philly.
We'll get to Joe Biden making a much more egregious error than that in a moment.
Because, frankly, I consider Philadelphia to be a suburb of New York anyway.
But it didn't, wherever they are, it didn't work.
And we still don't know where a lot of those ballots are.
They couldn't find some.
Then they did find the ballots, finally, at the P.O. box.
Then...
The investigative journalists who tried this experiment ended up getting someone else's mail.
They ended up getting two birthday cards in there.
So I don't know where their mail went, but they got two birthday cards.
21% of the 100 ballots, mock ballots that they mailed out, had not made it to the P.O. box after four days.
It's not that far to travel.
Some were missing after more than a week.
Three out of 100 of the ballots were just completely lost.
Three percent, right?
They mailed 100, three get lost.
Do you think three percent could swing an election?
I think it could.
Of course it could.
Our elections are razor thin for the last 20 years anyway.
Absolutely three percent could.
They're expecting right now 80 to 100 million voters to vote by mail.
So you're looking at just using this one little experiment as a test.
Three million votes could go missing.
And don't forget, only half the country, less than half the country votes.
That's a huge percentage of people.
It's not secure.
Here in California, as of the last couple years, they now list your party registration on the outside of the envelope.
In other words, now that we've got voter harvesting throughout a lot of the country, people will come, they'll take a look at that envelope and say, oh, a Republican ballot.
Whoops, got lost.
Lost in the mail.
Things get lost in the mail all the time.
What happens if, just like the birthday card issue here, someone else gets your ballot?
They don't agree with the positions you hold.
They can see your party registration on the outside.
Might just go missing.
This is what the left is pushing for, rife for abuse.
Some Democratic Congress lady asked Attorney General Barr yesterday, said, do you have any evidence that there could be fraud involved in the mail-in ballots?
And he said, I don't have evidence.
I have common sense.
Of course it could.
Even the fact that the news agency was making all these fake ballots that looked really, really, really real should give us some pause here.
But how else are Democrats going to steal this election?
They can't rely on their candidate.
Their candidate doesn't know where he is.
Forget about confusing a certain CBS affiliate.
This guy will actually show up to a place, fly in, drive in, get to a podium, start to give a speech, and have no clue where he is.
And worse than that, this happens sometimes in politics, he doesn't even know how to cover for it anymore.
Take a listen to the latest greatest hit from presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to Kingswood Community Center.
Actually, that's the one down I used to work.
It was a joke.
You didn't know where we were.
Anyway, it's great to be here.
Oh, that is sad.
That is very sad.
Because he walks up there.
I don't know what the joke would be if that were a joke.
He just got confused, right?
He's someplace that I guess it's near where he used to be.
And then he says, we're here at Kingman Community Center.
Oh, wait a second.
I'm not there.
Where am I? I'm just joking.
Just joking.
Definitely not in cognitive decline.
Anyway, let's move on with the show.
So he forgot where he was.
He then forgot where President Trump wasn't.
It is not a good idea.
Evidence the fact that a rhetorical question, I'm not expecting you to answer it.
Do you think the president all of a sudden decided not to go to Tallahassee because he no longer, he thought it was the interest of the public?
He decided...
Jacksonville.
I mean, Jacksonville, Florida.
So he was referring to the president now moving the Republican National Convention from Jacksonville, Florida, maybe back to Charlotte, maybe back to the White House, who knows?
But he didn't even remember where that was going to be.
Oh, we're having an earthquake right now at the Daily Wire.
It's amazing.
I hope we don't fall through the floor.
Gosh, 2020 just can't get any crazier, can it?
So, in any case, back to Joe Biden.
Joe Biden couldn't even remember that, where the RNC was going to be, then it wasn't going to be.
And beyond his inability to remember where we are, Joe Biden can't Formulate the sentences that will allow him to either get out of these gaffes or even just get a coherent idea apart.
That's probably the saddest part of it, right?
He's just kind of trailing off and, oh yeah, sorry, I don't know.
He's not even finishing his sentences.
They're just sentence fragments.
He was leaving his campaign office the other day.
One of his campaign staffers had to lead him out, almost holding his hand.
You can see it's a young staffer.
And he's kind of, he's looking in other directions, and she's holding him like it's her grandpa.
Like, you know, okay, come here, grandpa.
Don't, nope, don't talk to the reporters.
The minute the reporters put a microphone in front of his face, she says, okay, thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Get in the car, Joe.
Come on, we can't have you talking to reporters.
So they cannot campaign.
Out in the open, right?
They won't talk to reporters.
Every time they do speak to anybody, it's got to be highly manicured, highly tied up.
This ties in with big tech because what we have is a virtual campaign.
And a virtual campaign can be manipulated.
Just like a deep fake video, just like a Photoshopped photograph.
It can be manipulated and manicured to give the illusion of something that it's not.
If Joe Biden had to campaign in person, in real life, where we all ought to be living, in real life, where we're flesh and blood and we're moving around and we're held accountable for doing real things, he wouldn't stand a chance.
Trump would win 50 states and Greenland.
He'd win 51 states once we annexed Greenland.
But because these masters of the universe can create, using Joe Biden's image, they can create a candidate out of whole cloth, he actually might stand a chance.
Joe Biden also put out this statement.
I'm sure he didn't write it.
I'm sure he didn't even read it.
But he put out a statement to try to win over some of those voters in the middle.
He said, quote, I have said from the outset of recent protests that there is no place for violence and destruction of property.
Peaceful protesters should be protected and arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted.
So he's taking this stand.
He's moderating for the general.
He's saying, yeah, we don't we don't want to burn down the country.
Why is he doing that?
Because two days ago, Trump launched the most devastating ad that he has yet on the Biden campaign, which is if you elect Joe Biden, you're going to get robbed.
If you elect Joe Biden, the cops are going to get defunded.
Democrats are dangerous.
That was the message.
For the last few months, the Trump campaign has been dithering.
The Trump campaign has been attacking Joe for being too conservative.
They've attacked Joe for being too tough on crime.
It was just ridiculous.
It was very ineffective.
So the Biden campaign didn't care very much.
Now, though, the Trump campaign is getting serious.
And so Biden is moderating, too.
And he's actually, it seems, leaning toward picking a cop to be his VP. Not a real cop, but someone with a reputation of a cop.
Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris.
Now, how do we know that Joe Biden is leading toward Kamala Harris?
Because Politico accidentally broke the news in very explicit terms.
And then they tried to pretend in our digital age, where you can memory hole anything, that, oh, it was just a formatting error.
Never mind, nothing to see here.
We'll get into their announcement that was not an announcement.
Then we will get into where Trump stands on all of this.
But first, I've got to thank our friends over at Buttercloth.
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Buttercloth.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. So, Politico puts this out on their website, quote, Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris to become his running mate for the 2020 election on August 1st, two weeks before the Democratic National Convention, after keeping his choice close to the chest for months.
In his announcement, Biden called Harris a worthy opponent and a worthy running mate, alluding to the pair's rivalry during the earlier stages of the Democratic primary.
She will bring her experience as a prosecutor, household name recognition and skill as a debater to the ticket.
So, Politico walks this back, because as you might notice, it's not August 1st yet.
So, what is this announcement?
Joe Biden hasn't announced anything, to my knowledge.
They said, oh, that's just placeholder text.
You know, I've worked around newspapers and websites and politics for a bit.
That ain't placeholder text.
Placeholder text actually is this kind of nonsense Latin, which is called lorem ipsum, and it's just the kind of nonsense Latin that you fill in sometimes so you can figure out how things are going to be spaced out on a page.
You don't get very, very specific about who Joe Biden chooses for his running mate and how he chose her and when he did it and what the quotes were.
It seems to me the campaign is leaning heavily in her direction.
Though, with all of the leaks about Kamala Harris, they're clearly taking the temperature and maybe some people are working against her on the campaign.
In any case, Joe Biden is getting pretty serious.
They will, because of the extended lockdowns, be able to craft whatever image they want.
You don't need to worry so much about the gaffes on the campaign trail.
This will only favor the left because the big tech masters of the universe only favor the left.
Whenever there's a little accident, a little glitch, a little bug, and some search results, I don't know, there's search engine manipulation and all the left-wing sites seem to pop up, but not the right wing sites.
Or there'll be some terrible defamation of a conservative on the internet, but then they'll get rid of it.
All those accidents, all those glitches only seem to go in one direction.
Expect that to get much, much worse as November approaches.
So then we get to the question of President Trump, what should he do about this?
Right now, it would seem President Trump is leaning in the direction of giving a virtual convention speech from the White House or wherever.
That's a bad idea.
It's a very bad idea.
I said it from the very beginning.
Coronavirus is the campaign for Democrats.
What I mean by that is that the consequences of the virus, the lockdowns, the mail-in votes everywhere, the digital everything, that is the campaign.
That is their strategy to retake the White House.
If Trump plays into that, he is handing them the campaign.
He's handing them the election.
Don't play into that.
I think President Trump needs to go to Charlotte or Jacksonville.
I guess they're pulled out of there.
But go to Charlotte, probably, or wherever.
Give a speech in person to real people waving real Trump signs, wearing real MAGA hats, cheering in real time.
He needs the rallies.
The president needs the rallies.
That's the campaign.
And he's being hoodwinked by a liberal media and technological establishment and political establishment and public health establishment.
He's being hoodwinked.
Into giving up his campaign, the strongest assets he has for re-election, and giving it over to digital manipulators who can make Joe Biden look like he can string three words together.
He should not play into that.
Okay, we gotta tune out.
We cannot live our lives exclusively on technology.
Technology can be incredibly useful.
I think conservatives have benefited from it greatly.
It's allowed us to get past the gatekeepers of the mainstream media.
We should use it wisely.
We cannot give ourselves over to it entirely.
That would be to give over our politics to the left, and specifically to unaccountable oligarchs who not only don't care about us, they don't care about our country.
They are chasing the almighty dollar all the way to slave labor in China.
That is not the American dream.
President Trump just got in trouble actually for talking about the American dream.
He rescinded an Obama-era housing rule that was extraordinarily stupid and ineffective and even if it were to be effective, not particularly desirable.
And so President Trump pulls this out and he says, quote, I'm happy to inform all of the people living their suburban lifestyle dream, caps on SLD for some reason, that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing built in your neighborhood.
Your housing prices will go up based on the market.
Crime will go down.
I've rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH rule.
Enjoy.
Great stuff.
Love this idea.
Of course they called him a racist.
They call him a racist to be sneezes.
This is a great idea.
This Obama rule from 2015 allowed the federal government to withhold funding if it doesn't like how state and local governments are tinkering with low-income housing in any neighborhood at once.
That's obviously an extraordinary power grab by the federal government.
Ben Carson, the head of Housing and Urban Development, suggested that this might happen just a little while ago.
His comments were, quote, After reviewing thousands of comments on the proposed changes to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Regulation, we found it to be unworkable, ultimately a waste of time for localities to comply with, too often resulting in funds being steered away from communities that need them most.
So then they come out, they rescind this rule.
I think it's a wonderful idea.
Trump's got to go for the suburbs.
And the way he's going to win over the suburbs is not playing nice.
There's some people, especially on the right, who say the way that Trump's got to win the suburbs is he's got to become liberal and he's got to become a wimp and he's got to give in to the Democrats.
No, it's not how you're going to win the suburbs.
You know how you win the suburbs?
Bring down crime.
Make people feel safe.
Bring law and order.
You always hear that we're losing suburban women.
When push comes to shove, especially in presidential election years, suburban women tend to vote with their husbands.
Okay.
So you got to win the suburbs generally.
And the way you win the suburbs is by being normal.
Okay.
You don't need to be some extreme right-wing ideologue.
You certainly shouldn't be an extreme left-wing ideologue.
Just be normal and protect people's lives and property and speak to them in a direct way, the way that got President Trump the White House the first time around, and you And I think the Trump campaign is finally starting to do that.
I think that's a good thing.
That should strongly be encouraged.
You know, right now, I was reading Vice.
Why was I reading Vice?
I have no idea.
I was reading Vice.com, and there's a phenomenon going on on the left.
It's called woke fishing.
Have you heard about this?
Say, have you been woke fished while dating?
Here's how to tell.
There's a gal who's writing, Serena Smith, she says, when I was 17, I decided to go vegan, okay?
And I mentioned my new veganism to the guy I was seeing at the time.
17, okay.
And to my surprise, he seemed really annoyed.
He responded with an uninterruptible lecture on the importance of supporting British farmers.
I can still remember one of his appalled patronizing texts.
Oh no, you're not going to become one of those vegan feminists, are you?
I was confused.
He hadn't come across like someone who hated vegan feminists?
So where had this come from?
Woke fishing.
Woke fishing, put simply, is when people masquerade as holding progressive political views to ensnare potential partners.
A woke fish may at first present themselves as a protest-attending, sex-positive, anti-racist, intersectional feminist who drinks ethically sourced oat milk and has read the back catalog of Audre Lorde twice, but in reality, they don't give an S-H-I-T, or, as is often the case, they are actively the opposite in their personal lives.
It's like catfishing, but specifically with political This is terrific stuff.
I absolutely love that even the left is waking up to this.
First of all, what this woman doesn't understand is that every male feminist, every male vegan, every male leftist activist is just doing it to pick up chicks.
That's it.
The male feminists are the creepiest men on the planet.
Stay away from them.
They're pretending to be effeminate.
They're pretending to appeal to you.
They're just trying to get you into bed.
That's all it is.
Okay, you shouldn't fall for it.
That's true in the real world too, but this especially seems to be true on the internet where people can manicure their own profiles and make them seem to be something that they are not.
Well, that's what's going on.
We, as a fact of the internet, we have much more control in making ourselves seem to be something that we are not.
Much harder to do that in real life, though everyone does that to a certain degree as well.
But on the internet they do that especially.
It's not just on politics, it's even in your personal life, okay?
We need to be a little bit wary of that.
We need to realize, when we talk about ideology, we always say there's a big difference between the fantasy of the left and the reality that we see all around us.
Big difference between ideological theories and common sense.
The internet magnifies that times a zillion.
Because, you know, getting back to our Instagram challenge, you can take the picture to make you look any way you want the picture to make you look.
And you can airbrush it and you can have them say anything.
We need to avoid this in politics.
We need to avoid this in our personal lives as well.
Use technology when it's advantageous to us.
But as a broader rule for our lives, tune out, unplug, dig into the real world.
Otherwise, we've lost already.
We've got to get to the mailbag, though.
I've got to tell you, head on over to the Michael Knowles Show YouTube channel.
We've got interviews.
We've got reaction videos.
We have short, short segments from the show.
And be on a lookout this Saturday.
My interview with Ryan Long, who is the comedian who did that viral video when wokes and racists actually agree on everything.
That'll be up on Saturday.
And we'll have a teaser of that interview coming out on Friday.
Also, buy Ben's book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
You can get it.
It's terrific.
A really enjoyable read.
Head on over there and get a Daily Wire reader's pass.
One dollar for your first month, and three bucks a month after that.
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Head on over to DailyWire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
From Brad.
Dear Michael, this past weekend you said you would no longer watch the New York Yankees after the entire team knelt during the black ribbon ceremony on opening day.
I wanted you to know nearly the entire Boston Red Sox team stood during their opening day ceremony.
Will you see the light and become a Red Sox fan?
I would rather die than become a Red Sox fan.
I don't care how angry I am at the Yankees.
The Yankees are dead to me.
But I sure ain't going to become a Red Sox.
Come on, I've got some dignity.
I've got some patriotism and a love of New York left.
Absolutely not.
Nice try, though.
From Hugh Doc.
Hi, Michael.
I loved your response to Joe Rogan's take on video games.
You spoke about how, throughout history, great thinkers considered leisure to be an important use of time, and that we've lost a lot of our appreciation for leisure in today's culture.
What are your favorite leisurely activities, or what leisurely activities would you recommend to someone trying to implement more leisure time in their life?
How many times can we say leisure?
One thing I would recommend is a nice cigar every so often.
I did this last night with our pals at Jonathan Hay and Drew Klavan.
You know, I go to Drew's house a fair bit and have a nice cigar and maybe a scotch or two or three or 25.
And so that's a nice activity.
Cigars are great.
I'm not even joking about the cigar.
The cigar is great as a leisure activity because...
It tunes you into your taste, so you are kind of experiencing this aesthetic thing.
But you can either do it on your own, and when you smoke a cigar alone, it forces you to sit down and contemplate for 40 minutes or 45 minutes.
Very helpful.
And you can do it as a social activity and it is an aid to conversation.
And I don't just mean like, hey, how are the kids?
Or did you see what Susie did the other day?
I mean real conversation, where you're talking about real things that develop your mind and your spirit.
And the way that the ancient Greeks would have, you know, the way that this is described in kind of Plato is the idea that you're having a, like, you kind of have an intellectual child with the person you're conversing with.
You know, the kind of product of your two ideas and conversations coming together will produce this intellectual child.
That's very important.
I really like that.
Reading, obviously, though reading is not particularly relaxing, but it is a leisure activity that will develop you.
Going to church.
Highly recommend going to church.
You know, the body is a temple.
The temple needs incense, so you've got to smoke the stogies.
You should go to church as well.
I mean, contemplating God is sort of the definition of a leisure activity.
And we're using leisure not in the way that modern people use it, but in the higher sense of that.
So you should be going to church.
You should be praying.
You should be reading the scripture.
You should be thinking about God.
That's probably the highest end of the contemplative life.
You can paint.
I enjoy painting every now and again.
I'm not exactly Caravaggio, but I sure do enjoy it.
That's a great leisure activity that allows you to see something new, really focus on color, really focus on where we are in the world.
I'm all for the hustle.
I work a pretty long work day, but...
You can't only do that.
I mean, even if you're working 12 or 14-hour workday, you need some leisure time to contemplate the eternal things.
It'll make you better at your grind and your hustle, first of all, and it'll make you a fuller human person.
From Alex.
After a recent breakup, I'm doubting the institution of marriage being a viable and reasonable outcome for men in today's society.
Women are more likely to initiate a divorce, and when they do, the divorce hearings drastically tip in favor of women when it comes to custody.
Not only that, but they also take at least 50% of everything we've made for the family.
How can men expect to enter a marriage when they want a family and a lifelong partner, but those things are now harder and harder to hold onto?
My very practical advice is be Catholic.
And I say that because if you are Catholic and you're like really Catholic, like you actually practice it and you believe this stuff and you do this stuff, you cannot get divorced.
It is not permitted.
You would have to abandon your faith to be divorced.
It is not accepted.
Christ is very clear in Matthew.
No divorce.
You can't do it.
Obviously there are people who would call themselves or consider themselves Catholic who do get divorced and remarried, but You're not allowed to do that.
So that would be one thing that would increase your chances of having a happy marriage.
Now, there are many non-Catholics who have happy marriages as well.
You've got to make sure that you share at least the basic value that divorce is not an option.
You're in it.
You're in it for life.
There was something actually sort of charming about Will Smith and Jada Pinkett's marriage.
They had this bizarre conversation about their marriage the other day.
And they said, yeah, I cheated on you, and I cheated, and it was terrible, and it was a very hard marriage, and I thought it was on the ropes, but we're not getting divorced.
And they quoted bad boys.
They paraphrased bad boys.
They said, we ride together, we died together, bad marriage for life.
There's actually something kind of admirable about that.
I wish they didn't have a bad marriage, but there's something admirable about saying, we're not getting divorced.
It's just not going to happen.
So, we've got to figure out this marriage.
I think there is much greater hope, but you're not going to find it in the kind of regular, liberal, secular pop culture, where marriage is just treated as...
A slightly more serious relationship in line with all of your other romantic relationships.
And you should follow your romantic love wherever it goes.
You almost certainly will need to marry someone who's quite religious.
You'll have to marry someone who's constitutionally conservative.
I don't mean that like document the constitution.
I mean their own personal constitution has to be moderate and conservative, so they're not taken to flights of fancy like leaving you for the secretary or something.
And you're going to have to spell out what the marriage is at the outset.
We always talk about how we have to be specific with words.
Well, marriage has been redefined and redefined ad nauseum in the last 60 years.
You've got to make sure that you're entering into the same institution that your future spouse thinks they're entering into.
But I think there is hope.
You've just got to find a good spouse.
From Kara.
What a great name.
Dear Michael Knowles, people I thought I knew my whole life are coming out on social media completely believing fake news, 100%.
And the scary part is, if you show them the truth, they get angry.
There's no middle ground for conversation.
The truth is, they're delusional, and at the least, they're narrow-minded.
Do I turn the other cheek, forgive them, for they know not what they do, and keep my mouth shut while their lips flap lies and demand justice over whatever their soup of the day is?
Sincerely, Kara, an outcast from New York.
You got to be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.
If you think it will be productive for you to call out a lie and you think you can do so in a way that's not going to completely destroy the relationship, then I would insert yourself.
Or if you were asked your opinion, you should certainly say what your opinion is.
You should have integrity about that.
But sometimes the problem runs a little bit deeper.
You're not going to be able to change someone's mind by just picking apart every little thing that Rachel Maddow says on MSNBC. You're going to have to get down to basics, first principles.
Beyond tax rates and China policy, you've got to get down to...
What is America?
What is the human person?
What is our relationship to government?
What are we here for?
How did we come to be?
I mean, like really basic questions.
Cardinal Manning, a great political thinker, said at bottom all human conflict is theological.
So you've got to get down to the basics of where they're getting their political views.
And if you can get them dislodged from some of the leftist or liberal lies that undergird their political views, then you might be able to change their opinions, even on the fake news itself.
From Joel, a steer religious podcaster.
My wife and I are coming up on our first anniversary.
Since we got married, we have been discussing when to begin having children.
As a Catholic, I've been wanting to accept children as they come.
My wife, a Methodist, has always wanted to wait a little while.
We originally decided that we would wait a year before really trying to have our first child.
But with that year ending in the current political climate, she's begun to question whether or not we should wait a little longer.
Her fear is that if things get really bad, then our lives and livelihoods could become quickly endangered and we would be unable to support our new child.
Ugh.
I've made the argument that childbearing and rearing is the highest calling of a married couple, and that to accept a certain level of risk is always present in this endeavor.
Do you think I should continue trying to convince her to start having children soon, or should I acquiesce to her in this?
Do not acquiesce to your wife.
What is wrong with you?
You're right.
Your wife is wrong.
It's as simple as that.
Have kids.
You should have started having kids on day one, but better late than never.
Do it.
Just do it.
First of all, if you're using contraception within marriage, you are, at a very basic level, withholding something from your spouse.
We don't need to get into specifics here.
All right, this is not an R or X-rated show, but you see what I'm saying.
That has symbolic significance, that you're withholding something.
You ought to give to the spouse totally, and you ought to be open to life.
You, as a Catholic, believe that, as I do.
Your wife is a Methodist, maybe doesn't.
Plenty of couples, contracept, and they've come to this understanding together.
And maybe they don't want to have kids, and I guess that's the decision that they have made.
Fine, I get that.
But you have a disagreement here.
And you actually have a religious disagreement, which is, you ought to try to have kids.
By the way, not everybody gets to have kids.
And for people who are trying to have kids, sometimes it doesn't happen right away.
I know a lot of young people who think it's going to happen right away, and then it doesn't.
You gotta keep working on it.
Maybe try a different angle.
I don't know.
There are a lot of things you can try.
But you should get started right away.
It is good.
It is objectively good to have children, and it is objectively bad to try not to have children, or to try not to let your husband have children, or, you know, with you, hopefully.
That's a bad thing, to close yourself off from life.
This argument that, oh, but it's crazy in 2020.
Yeah, it's always crazy.
Politics is always crazy.
Relatively, compared to most other times in history, things are kind of calm right now.
Have kids.
Do it.
And also, the other thing is, I mean, if you have this kind of political or religious, I guess, disagreement on the kids thing, At the very least, you can point to Genesis 3 and say that you ought to be the head of the household and inasmuch as you're doing that, have the kids.
And if you can't have kids, maybe consider adoption.
You know, I mean, look, not everyone gets to have kids, but...
If you can, you certainly should try.
All right.
Last one from Daniel.
Dear austere, religious, mostly peaceful covfefe.
That is my official title.
Do you think the Biden campaign is delaying their VP pick until as close to the election as possible to avoid scrutiny of their VP? I think if they pick one now, that would shift the focus off of Trump and onto whatever wild-eyed radical they put on the Trojan horse.
Fair enough.
I mean, I think the Biden campaign is delaying everything.
And they're delaying everything because they don't have to campaign.
I think the Biden campaign right now believes that they are winning.
And as long as they get to stay in the basement, and Trump is not allowed to hold rallies, and as long as, you know, until maybe the last week or two, the Trump campaign was kind of falling apart, that they're going to win by doing nothing.
And so they're going to do nothing.
Why would they risk anything new?
Don't expect the Biden campaign to do anything, including name their VP pick, until they are forced to by Republicans.
That's on us.
We've got to pressure them.
The Trump campaign's got to pressure them.
We've got to use the political levers to get Biden's base to pressure him.
We've got to use wedges to split the far-left Democratic Party from Joe Biden on major issues.
That's on us.
We can't do that without a campaign.
We can't do that with a virtual digital campaign that's controlled by the puppet masters of the universe.
We've got to get out there and engage in real politics, which means public, which means real life.
That is the mission that we have, and if we fail and if we loaf and if we sit on our couches and take selfies or take inadvertent selfies while Instagram spies on us, We'll be giving away a whole lot more than just some data on our cell phone.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you later.
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