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Dec. 16, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:35
Ep. 665 - No News Is Bad News

Mitch McConnell calls Joe Biden “president-elect,” CNN complains that Melania read a book to sick kids in a hospital, and CA governor Gavin Newsom faces a serious recall effort. 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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As the president's days in office appear to be dwindling, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany is offering the dishonest news media a few more rhetorical beatings for the road.
Earlier this year, we heard from several news outlets and so-called fact checks that President Trump would need, quote, a miracle to be right.
That was an NBC News article.
We were told, according to Helpline, quote, a vaccine will still take more than a year to develop.
USA Today warned us that, quote, despite medical researchers' progress, the vaccine, quote, was more than a year away.
And National Geographic even told us that achieving a vaccine within, quote, a year to 18 months would be absolutely unprecedented, end quote.
These reports deserve their own fact check.
False.
President Trump has not only been the optimist, hopeful to achieve a vaccine by year's end, he has also been a leader.
He's been a leader.
I hope that this is not the end.
It's hard to imagine that this is all going to go away.
If so, things are going to get a lot more boring.
A lot of people say no news is good news.
That's not true.
If you're a conservative, no news is very, very bad.
Boring is very, very, very bad.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is Michael Knowles, this is The Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment from yesterday from Thomas Fahey, who says, How American, though?
Land o' lakes removes the Indian but keeps the land.
That's true.
Maybe there's something about this woke leftism that's actually very much in keeping with the American tradition.
Not a particularly nice American tradition, but an American tradition nonetheless.
Very, very possible.
It's sorry to see that we're returning to normal.
I guess that is the point.
The normal type of American government, at least since, gosh, FDR, has been this steadily more progressive liberalism.
And there have been a few little blips that pop up every so often.
And I think, well, Eisenhower was pretty liberal.
You think of Nixon, maybe.
But they made sure he got out of office pretty quick, even after he won in a landslide.
Reagan, sort of.
Although Reagan never got to shrink the government, never had any work with Congress that he was able to.
To work out because Tip O'Neill held the Democratic line.
We got amnesty under Reagan.
Bush, obviously.
Both Bushes pretty liberal.
Trump, we had this four years.
They weren't going to let him have another four years, though.
Going back to normal, going back to boring, is not...
And that's not conservative.
I think there's this idea that conservatives want no news, just lay back, everything's fine, everything's the same.
That isn't true when you're in a regime that is extremely liberal and progressive.
In that case, you want to disrupt things.
Donald Trump, most conservative president of the last quarter century at least, probably of the last century.
And that guy wasn't boring.
The reason it hasn't been boring is because Trump has actually pushed back against the liberal establishment and the liberal establishment freaked out.
That's why CNN has been, their heads have been exploding again and again every day.
They explode in the morning, then they regenerate at night, then they explode again the next day because Trump is actually challenging that boring liberal regime.
And they're getting their parting shots in, by the way, before Kayleigh McEnany has to say goodbye.
I wish she did not have to, but there's news that would make it seem almost inevitable at this point.
Still, Jim Acosta screaming out a few more insults as she leaves.
And good for those who covered what was the story all along and not Russia disinformation.
Isn't it hypocritical for you to accuse others of disinformation when you spread it every day?
Uh, Kayleigh, why would you accuse, you're terrible, I hate you.
Jim Acosta, CNN, I hate you, Kayleigh.
Why are you doing this to us?
Now for the next four years, assuming that Biden does get this, you're going to have questions such as you heard during the Obama administration.
One question, Mr.
President, what enchants you about the White House?
Yeah.
These are serious questions that the media asked, and that's what you're going to get.
You're not going to be tuning in.
You're not going to get constant press coverage of the White House briefing room or of what's going on in the administrative agencies.
It's all going to go back to the background, and they're going to continue to slowly destroy our country and erode our constitutional order without any sort of consequence.
We actually should enjoy these parting shots from CNN and from the press.
Because it means that the conservative government here, the conservative administration, is still driving them crazy.
I saw an article on CNN yesterday.
I'm sorry to report.
I saw this tweet come up from CNN. It said, quote, First Lady Melania Trump broke stated mask policy at Children's National Hospital when she removed her mask to read a holiday book to children.
There is so little to criticize about Melania Trump that the best they can do is to criticize her for going to a children's hospital, reading a book to children at Christmas But obviously taking the mask off so she can read it because otherwise the book would sound like the teachers in Charlie Brown.
That's the best they've got.
This woman is so graceful, so flawless, that the best they've got is she reads books to children in the hospital.
If you are at the Children's National Hospital, You're having a tough time, okay?
Coronavirus is not your number one concern.
To have a little glimmer of light in that Christmas season of the first lady coming and reading you a book, that's very nice.
And CNN, they got nothing.
So they say, I'm so angry at Melania Trump because she, checks notes, reads books to sick children.
Enjoy it now, folks.
Enjoy it.
I want you to enjoy every single one of these CNN articles.
I want you to enjoy every one of Jim Acosta's stupid outbursts.
Because things are about to get very, very boring.
And boring is very bad.
At least with Trump.
Let's say you're upset because Trump didn't finish building the wall.
Trump didn't, I don't know, totally...
He did actually revive the economy, but then the lockdowns tipped the economy back.
So he didn't get to revive it again.
I don't know, he didn't stand up strong enough against the lockdowns, whatever.
Donald Trump, just in opposing these sorts of liberal policies, drew so much light to them.
I mean, even going into the 2016 election, I think most of us, myself included, didn't realize just how corrupt the federal bureaucracy was.
We didn't think that the federal bureaucracy would actually spy on a Republican presidential campaign to try to undermine an election.
And then after the guy won accidentally, spent years and years trying to wage a bureaucratic coup d'etat.
Even I, and I do not have a very high opinion of the deep state or the administrative state.
I didn't think they would stoop that low.
And they did.
You saw that kind of corruption.
You saw some corruption come to light under Obama because he would, at one minute he would say it'd be unconstitutional to pass executive amnesty.
The next minute he'd be passing executive amnesty with a completely straight face.
So you would see that a little bit.
But it's been the pushback from the liberal establishment that's really shown you how bad the situation has gotten.
And we're not going to see that, assuming Biden becomes president.
It's just all going to happen in the background.
And CNN is going to smile and talk about the weather.
I don't know.
Distract you with something else.
And we're not even going to be able to see how bad things are getting.
The reason I'm talking in this kind of way, by the way, is that you now have senior members of the government, Republicans, who are acknowledging Joe Biden as the president-elect.
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The reason I'm talking about this Biden administration at this point basically is an inevitability.
It's because in order to stave it off at this point, after the Electoral College has voted, you would need something like you saw in the Compromise of 1877, where the Congress goes in, maybe the Congress objects to some of the electoral votes, and then you would have something like an Electoral Commission, which in the 1870s was made up of five members of the House, five members of the Senate, five members of the Court.
Already, you know the Court's not going to go for giving this to Trump.
They've refused to even hear cases that I think were quite legitimate.
The House obviously isn't.
It's in Democratic control.
So your only hope is the Senate and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell yesterday referring to President-elect Joe Biden.
But our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on January the 20th.
The Electoral College has spoken.
So today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.
The President-elect is no stranger to the Senate.
He's devoted himself to public service for many years.
I also want to congratulate the Vice President-elect, our colleague from California, Senator Harris.
Beyond our differences, all Americans can take pride that our nation has a female Vice President-elect for the very first time.
I look forward to finishing out the next 36 days strong with President Trump.
Our nation needs us to add another bipartisan chapter to this record of achievement.
Not very cocaine vibes.
I gotta tell you, I was hoping for more Tony Montana from Cocaine Mitch.
I wanted to see him just lean down, bury his face in whatever was scattered across his notes, stand up and say, say hello to my little electoral commission to overturn the certification.
We didn't get it.
We didn't get it.
We're not going to get it.
Absent some absolutely unexpected turn of events, you know, the Kraken falls down from heaven or something, it's looking like a Biden administration.
Everyone believes this to be the case already.
The media are feeling emboldened.
Big tech in particular is feeling emboldened.
Big tech, Twitter, Donald Trump's favorite social media platform.
Twitter is already saying that after election day, they may ban President Trump from Twitter.
They've wanted to do it while he's in office.
But they're in a bit of a bind because they allow the Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran to tweet and talk about the destruction of Israel and whatever he wants.
And they don't have any problem with that.
But they, death to America, whatever.
That's fine.
But they realized it would look like a double standard if you allowed the Ayatollah to stay on Twitter, but took the duly elected president of the United States off Twitter.
So instead, what have they done?
You know, you've been seeing this.
They just add a fact check to every single one of Trump's tweets at this point.
He says, oh, I had a good omelet for breakfast.
This claim is disputed.
Official sources dispute this claim.
Yeah, I had three eggs in my omelet.
Jim Acosta says he might have only had two and a half or maybe four.
Fact check.
So they're going to get rid of it.
After January 20th, they say that they will very possibly kick Donald Trump off of Twitter.
Why?
Because so long as President Trump stays on Twitter, he's the second most followed politician after Barack Obama.
Barack Obama was the first president during the age of Twitter, and personally pretty popular himself.
If you allow President Trump to remain on Twitter, then he still has a voice that can break through beyond the mainstream media, beyond the gatekeepers, who are now going to try to make everything very, very boring.
You're going to see their ratings decline.
Trump has been phenomenal for the mainstream media's ratings.
Doesn't matter.
He's undercutting the liberal establishment project.
And so they're going to try to cut him out as best they possibly can.
I'm sure Twitter makes a fair...
I don't really know how Twitter monetizes their platform beyond the advertisements and selling your data, probably to China.
But they are...
I'm sure Twitter could make more money and have more engagement on their platform if they allowed President Trump to stay on.
And still, they will oppose it.
Because they want to get back to boring business as usual.
But it does appear to be coming to an end.
You know, I have held out hope longer than just about anybody in conservative politics.
I don't think we should concede the race early.
I don't think we should do any of those.
I don't think it's overturning constitutional norms to question the results of an election that obviously had many, many, many, many irregularities and sometimes outright criminal behavior in places.
I don't think there's anything wrong about that.
But it does appear to be coming to an end.
Bill Barr, attorney general, whom I've had the privilege of interviewing, the honey badger, is leaving the Trump administration.
Some people are a little upset with Bill Barr right now because Barr did not come out and overtly challenged the results of the election.
One thing I will say, and I think it's when we're trying to figure out what do we think of the Barr era at the DOJ, President Trump is being very complimentary toward Bill Barr as he leaves.
Donald Trump has not always been very complimentary toward his leaving attorneys general.
You remember what he did to poor Jeff Sessions and to other cabinet members.
But he says, quote, just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House.
Our relationship has been a very good one.
He has done an outstanding job.
As per Bill's letter, he will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.
Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become acting attorney general, highly respected Richard Donahue, will be taking over the duties of Deputy AG.
Thank you to all.
So he's being very kind to Bill Barr.
And Bill Barr, by the way, in his resignation letter, was extraordinarily complimentary to President Trump.
He says, I'm greatly honored that you called on me to serve your administration, the American people, once again as attorney general.
Don't forget, he had already been attorney general during the Bush one administration.
I'm proud to have played a role in the many successes and unprecedented achievements you have delivered for the American people.
Your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of the relentless and implacable resistance.
Your 2016 victory speech in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met with a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds.
The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your administration.
This is a great resignation letter, basically saying, you are great, your opponents are dirtbags, and I'm sorry it's coming to an end.
And so...
I look at this not as a prescriptive matter, Bill Barr saying, yeah, we need the Trump administration to end, step down, concede.
He's basically saying, no, you got done dirty, buddy, but it's over anyway because that's the constitutional system.
So you lose guys like Bill Barr who talk about the absolute onslaught of partisan trash that they've heaped on you.
You lose people like Kayleigh McEnany who just go out every day with a nice long whip and just start whipping the press with her searing, wonderful rhetoric and facts and logic.
It's been really enjoyable.
Now, what are we getting?
Well, President-elect Joe Biden is naming people to his cabinet.
And what are the big exciting picks?
What are the ones that are really, oh man, here it comes, for good or for ill.
Pete Buttigieg as Transportation Secretary.
This news is so boring and lame, I think I'm going to fall asleep just reading it.
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Pete Buttigieg as Transportation Secretary.
Why will Pete Buttigieg be the Transportation Secretary?
Does he know anything about transportation?
No.
Does this matter?
No.
Some conservatives are criticizing him for this.
They're saying he has no expertise and it doesn't matter.
Well, when Pete Buttigieg was mayor of South Bend, he had potholes in the road.
Yeah, okay, fine.
It just doesn't matter.
Pete Buttigieg is nothing.
Just like Joe Biden is nothing, Pete Buttigieg is nothing.
He is an empty avatar.
He is a robot built in the deep state factories of Langley by the liberal establishment to just beep boop, spout whatever talking points.
The liberal, neoliberal establishment wants.
And so, sure, he's going to be the transportation secretary.
He could be the education secretary.
He could be the energy secretary.
It doesn't matter.
He could be the ambassador to China.
He could be the ambassador to Iran.
He could be the ambassador to Malta.
It just doesn't matter.
I don't know that Pete Buttigieg has ever had an original thought in his entire life.
I don't think Pete Buttigieg has ever questioned the establishment in his whole life.
And by the way, when I say establishment...
I think people feel a little comfortable with that.
Because, you know, that's just the way things are.
Just like when I say, we're not going to have any more news.
You know, it's going to get really boring.
Maybe boring is a good thing.
It's not.
It's not.
Because doing nothing, allowing the establishment to progress, when that establishment has been veering leftward and accelerating for 70 years, 100 years maybe, that's a recipe for disaster.
A guy like Pete Buttigieg, to be an establishmentarian and tells you something's going really bad with the establishment.
Pete Buttigieg's father was one of the most famous neo-Marxist scholars in the country.
He was a founding member and president of the Gramsci Society, the International Gramsci Society.
Antonio Gramsci, the head of the Italian Communist Party, one of the most famous Marxist thinkers ever.
Gramsci is sort of one of the founders of what you would call cultural Marxism or neo-Marxism.
That's Buttigieg's dad.
That's the guy who educated Buttigieg.
But because the establishment has basically embraced all of these guys, all this radicalism, kind of craziness of the 20s and 30s and up through into the 60s, all that has just become...
The norm now.
That's political correctness.
That is the establishment.
That's what we're going to get.
Now, they're making a big deal about Buttigieg.
They're trying to pretend this is anything other than extremely boring because Buttigieg, I don't know if you heard this, Buttigieg is a gay guy.
Did you know that?
I know.
He never talks about it.
Nobody ever makes it as though that's a personality.
I'm a gay guy.
That's a personality.
Okay, interesting.
So they're saying that Buttigieg is the first openly gay cabinet secretary in American history.
Queerty, which is some LGBT, LMNOP outlet, I suppose.
Queerty says, Buttigieg, the first openly gay cabinet official.
But he's not.
He's not.
Actually, Rick Grinnell was the first openly gay cabinet official, acting director of national intelligence under, who was it?
Was it Clinton?
Was it Obama?
Was it?
No, it was Donald Trump.
That homophobe, that bigot, Donald Trump.
Actually, it was, yeah, it was a Republican, was the first one.
Doesn't matter.
Queerty actually mentioned that at the time, but now they're going to rewrite it.
They're going to lie to you.
They're going to completely rewrite history and no one's going to say boo about it.
One of the few people who has a platform and the chutzpah to do it would be Donald Trump and they're going to try to kick him off Twitter.
So how do we push back against this?
The old strategy is not going to work.
The live and let live, maybe, you know, no news is good news.
Why do we have to focus on all this stuff?
That is, I think, the old strategy from the 90s and 2000s.
And I don't think it's going to work.
You're seeing this return of the liberal establishment is always progressing to the left.
And now it's fashionable in some quarters to say that the solution to this is not conservatism, but true liberalism.
So what they'll say is there's a difference between leftism and liberalism.
And leftism is bad, but liberalism is good.
And you know, conservatives, we're the true liberals.
And the liberal left, you know, they're actually illiberal.
Because, you know, they want to censor you or something like that.
Matthew McConaughey, who is increasingly talking about politics and seems like a nice enough guy, you know, he seems somewhat conservative or at least centrist compared to his colleagues in Hollywood.
He articulated this point on a British morning show.
He said that the answer is not conservatives or conservative thought.
What we need to do is just all be liberals.
You need liberals.
What I don't think we need is the ill liberals.
And what I don't think that some liberals...
See is that they're often being cannibalized by the ill liberals.
Now, you know, there are extremes on both sides that I think are unfair, that I don't think are the right place to be.
The extreme left and the extreme right completely illegitimize the other side, the liberal and the conservative side, which we need in certain places.
The two extremes illegitimize those two sides.
Or they exaggerate that side's stance into an irrational state that makes no sense.
And that's not fair when either side does that.
You know, where the waterline is going to land on this freedom of speech and what we allow and what we don't and where this cancel culture goes, where that waterline lands is a very interesting place that we're engaged in right now as a society of trying to figure out because we haven't found the right spot.
Okay, right there.
I don't even need to refute Matthew McConaughey's argument because McConaughey refutes it himself.
I think this is a good impulse.
I don't mean to beat up on Matthew McConaughey.
I think he has all good impulses and I just think this is an idea that a lot of people have.
I've had this idea myself when they think about politics and it's just half-baked.
The idea that, look, we don't want conservatives telling people How they ought to behave.
And we don't want leftists telling people how they ought to behave.
And we don't want conservatives telling people that maybe they shouldn't say that thing.
And we don't want leftists telling people maybe they shouldn't say that thing.
What we need is true liberalism.
But then at the very end, he says, and what we need to do on this free speech issue is just figure out exactly what sort of things we're going to tolerate.
And we haven't figured out exactly what that is yet.
You say, wait a second.
I thought you were calling for liberalism.
I thought you were calling for let everybody say what they want.
let everybody do what they want.
But then you're recognizing you need a standard.
The reason that this argument, that we need to be liberal, not illiberal, that the illiberal right is terrible and the illiberal left is terrible and we all just need to be able to say and do whatever we want all the time.
The problem with that argument is that has never existed anywhere in history and it never will.
That is a utopian idea.
The idea that there can be no boundaries on what we say or do and that there are no consequences to people's behavior and that if you act virtuously or you act viciously, it's all sort of the same and has no political consequence.
That is a utopian, ridiculous idea that is meant for freshman year philosophy class or staying up...
Ripping a bong at 3 in the morning in your dorm room saying, ha ha man, wouldn't that be cool?
If it feels good, do it.
That's not how politics actually works.
Some people now call this kind of idea libertarianism.
And I think that does a disservice to serious libertarian thinkers.
But in as much as this is libertarianism, it's got the same problem that socialism does.
You always hear the socialists say, true socialism has never been tried.
True communism has never been tried.
Well, true liberalism has never been tried like this.
Because it can't be.
Because you always need some kind of a standard.
And I actually give the left credit for recognizing that.
Isn't it weird that any, in all liberal societies, every single where in the West where this sort of thing has been tried, and even some other places that have adopted liberal societies, they all seem to just always trend toward progressivism and a kind of leftism, and there's no way to stop it?
Isn't that weird?
Is that just like a weird coincidence?
But if we just try it one more time, that'll work?
No, maybe we need to rethink how we're talking about this.
Maybe maximizing individual autonomy is not a totally coherent end goal of politics.
You know, someone who showed this to me the other day is Lizzo.
I don't know if you remember Lizzo.
Lizzo is like a larger pop culture figure.
She's sort of famous for being a big girl, is the phrase that she used.
And she's a singer and talks about body positivity and all this.
Lizzo just got in trouble because, I kid you not, she went on a diet.
You know, people are very concerned with the way that they look, but it's not always in the way that you expect.
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That is K-E-E. Also, I've got to let you know, Monday, December 21st, the historical docuseries Apollo 11, What We Saw, will be available exclusively at dailywire.com.
This takes a detailed look at the Apollo 11 mission to land a man on the moon.
It's a terrific series to watch with your loved ones over the Christmas season.
Right now, you can get it for 20% off with code WATCH. The way I think about these three categories,
conservatism, liberalism, and leftism, or wokeism, or whatever, is that conservatism says...
You should follow the conservative moral standard and respect conservative institutions, the traditional institutions, and maybe have some deference toward your forebears and the founding fathers and your parents and have some loyalty and have some patriotism and recognize your duty in this world.
That's kind of the conservative view.
Then the leftist view is just like a flip of that.
Which is you should follow the new leftist, radical, politically correct moral order.
You should feel entitlement.
You should feel sort of disdain for the past because the past was bad and the future is better.
So you should feel really good about yourself and about the future.
But you should hate the past and basically have the opposite of patriotism.
Have disdain for your country because you're going to move into this wonderful future.
But they are sort of parallel.
They're just a mirror image of one another.
And then in the middle, you have liberalism.
And liberalism says, do what you want.
Do what you want.
If it feels good, do it.
If it's not bothering anybody, you know, and it's not affecting the politics, and it's just private, then just do whatever you want.
Now, the reason that liberalism is unstable is, of course, because the things that we do, that we sometimes pretend are private, do have political effects.
A good example of this is gender or the gender ideology.
I'm a man, but I say I now identify as a woman.
Okay, that's a private choice, but it has public effect.
Because now I'm going to go use the women's bathroom.
Am I allowed to do that?
Obviously affects other people.
Now I'm going to insist that everyone else call me a woman.
Call me she.
Well, now I'm infringing on someone else's private choice, aren't I? But it's my private.
So whose private choice gets to win?
Obviously, these private choices have a public effect.
And so the liberalism that we're talking about today is pretty incoherent, but it's very, very popular.
And it goes off the rails real, real quick.
Lizzo, this sort of larger performer, went on a diet last month.
She is, I'm not in any way making fun of the way she looks or anything, but she is objectively not that healthy.
It is not healthy to carry around that much weight.
And so if she's going to do something for her, she said she had these physical symptoms that go along with the way she had been eating.
So she decides she wants to just fix those symptoms and feel a little bit better.
So she goes on a diet and people were furious because she is supposed to embrace whatever lifestyle she wants.
And she, never mind that she's changed what lifestyle she wants, now they're saying, no, you, you, you came to fame as the pro-fat, pro-body positivity woman.
And so you need to remain fat.
You need to pursue your own appetites to their extreme and never even think about changing them.
And you know what Lizzo did after she went on this diet?
She apologized.
I did the 10 day smoothie detox and as you know, I would normally be so afraid and ashamed to post things like this online because I feel like as a big girl, people just expect if you are doing something for health, you're doing it for like a dramatic weight people just expect if you are doing something for health, you're And that is not the case.
In reality, November stressed me the f*** out.
I ate a lot of spicy things and things that fucked my stomach up.
And I wanted to reverse it and get back to where I was.
I'm so proud of myself.
I'm proud of my results.
My sleep has improved, my hydration, my inner peace, my mental stability, my body, my skin, the whites of my eyes.
I feel and look like a bad bitch.
And I think that's it.
I'm a big girl who did a smoothie detox.
And I wanted to share that with you guys.
I got exactly what I wanted out of it.
And every big girl should do whatever the they want with their bodies.
This is very confusing.
Because on the one hand, you say, the thing I did to get healthier really felt good and I feel really great about it.
But also, you should do whatever the F you want with your body.
Well, if you're saying it makes you feel better and it's good, then why don't you recommend that to other people?
And why this confessional approach?
I'm sorry.
I went on a diet.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
You know, seriously, when Catholics...
When Catholics confess their sins, they go to a confessional, right?
Just like you see in the movies.
You go into the confessional and there's the priest there and you say, tell me your sins.
One sin, when you're making your examination of conscience and you confess, a sin is gluttony.
Gluttony is a sin.
Drinking too much is a sin.
And if you've been eating a little too much, maybe you're stress eating.
I don't know.
I've been stress eating a lot.
I've got a lot going on in the last couple months.
That can be sinful if you do that willfully.
And so you would confess it.
And this is just the exact flip of that.
It's like the left-wing confession.
You say, I did not overeat this month.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
My fault.
My fault.
Through my most grievous fault, I did not overdrink.
I only drank a little bit this month.
I'm sorry.
I didn't pursue my appetites to their fullest extent.
Now, maybe you're saying, Michael, you're reading too much into Lizzo's apology for going on a diet to her fans.
I don't think so.
She actually had to publish a second apology, which was far...
She wasn't wearing as much clothing in this one, so it was...
Maybe just listen to this.
I don't know.
Who knows?
She had to give this second apology to offer the philosophical basis for the reason she apologized in the first place.
Your body is perfectly yours, even if it ain't perfect to anybody else.
If you only knew the complexities your body possesses, you would be so proud of it.
I'm so proud of you for making it this far in a society that gives us a head start into self-loathing, that hands us a dysmorphic mirror and leaves us desperate to catch up with who we think we should be.
I've spent so much time in this body and I am no different than you.
Still struggling to find balance.
Still trying to mend my relationship with food, my anxiety, my back fat.
It gets easier.
I've spent my hardest days trying to love me.
If I have any advice, it is to eat.
Drink.
Move.
Rest.
Your job is to grow.
Your job is to figure it out along the way.
Regardless of what I or any so-called expert says, you love you.
And I hope you remember that.
No.
No.
Whatever philosophical view that is, no.
Not that.
You should not hate yourself.
You should not hate your body.
You should not be proud of your body either.
You should not consider your body to be the be-all and end-all of your life.
Both of those things are pretty bad.
Both of those things can lead to eating disorders, by the way.
Obsessing all the time about your body, whether that you're too fat or that you're too skinny or whatever.
Those can lead to anorexia.
They can lead to morbid obesity.
The problem with this is This point of view, this liberalism, I guess, tells you to focus above all on yourself, what you want, what your appetites are, how you feel that you want to identify.
Frankly, even if it has not talked about another dysmorphic ideology, the idea that your physical body has nothing to do with your true self.
Which is, you see this expressed most clearly in gender ideology, that, you know, you can look like a man, but actually deep down be a woman.
And you just keep thinking, what am I? What am I? Who am I? What am I? Me, me, me.
I, me, my.
I, me, my.
The key is not to think more of yourself.
It's not to think less of yourself, for that matter.
It's to think of yourself less.
Focus on other things.
There are other things out there in the world.
And the way this breaks down then is, when you kind of get out of this childish liberalism, then you can either go the conservative route and say, okay, there's something outside of myself, and it looks kind of like this moral order, and it kind of looks like these traditional things, and it looks like the seven virtues, and the vices, and don't do the vices, and okay, right.
And then the other way you can go is the woke view.
That leftism offers a coherent moral framework.
It's, I'm sorry, it's internally consistent.
It's objectively incoherent, though, right?
When you look at it, it's like a completely inverted moral framework.
And this, you do you, do whatever you want, if it feels good, do it, liberalism in the middle, that doesn't make any sense.
And the conservatives who think, well, let's just go for that.
That's stable.
That's a truce.
It's not.
You have to pick a side.
And what the, obviously, the liberal establishment has trended woke For a hundred years.
It's been going on for so long.
And if you think that as we're getting a more liberal government again, that you're going to fight that by retreating to this lame, meek liberalism, it ain't going to work, buddy.
You need to be able to say things.
Say moral truths.
Say political truths.
Actually have some courage.
Actually say people should do this sort of thing.
They shouldn't do this sort of thing.
That's not un-American.
That's not illiberal even.
That's how politics is and has always been.
You know, this stuff gets really wild.
If you want to follow liberalism to its logical conclusion, there's this left-wing writer, Noah Berlatsky, who he's got bylines at NBC, The Atlantic, Washington Post, The Guardian, foreign policy, all over the place.
This guy tweeted out yesterday, parents are tyrants.
Parent is an oppressive class like rich people or white people.
There are things you can do to try to minimize the abuse that's endemic to the parent-child relationship, but it's always there.
And you can imagine Noah writing this tweet out very angstily when his mother told him no more video games for the 90s.
Parents are an oppressor class!
They don't let me play Fortnite or whatever.
I don't even know what video games are popular now.
This view of parents is actually the logical conclusion of liberalism.
You see this with actually radical libertarians.
There's a radical sort of right-wing libertarian who talks about this all the time, that you should divorce yourself from your parents.
We shouldn't have family.
Family is an oppressive institution that we're born into.
It inhibits our individualism because we have obligations to our mothers and fathers or whatever.
And so you should shun your family.
Radical libertarians on the right will say that, and radical liberals on the left, like Noah Berlatsky, will say that too.
It's obviously ridiculous on its face.
When McConaughey said, we just talk about these fringe ideas and that's a bad idea.
Sure, you don't want to do it in bad faith, but you do want to be able to follow ideas to their logical conclusion.
And the logical collusion of you do you, all that matters is maximizing your individual autonomy, is this craziness from Berlatsky.
You know, parents are an oppressor class and we should just do whatever we want all the time.
That is not a recipe for flourishing.
That is what we've been pursuing for a long time in this country.
And it's what has led us to this awful desiccated establishment.
We need to push back.
We need to push back legally.
We need to push back honestly, but we need to push back.
There is an effort underway to do that in California.
Governor Gavin Newsom, Is facing a recall effort.
Now this has been building very, very slowly for some time now.
During the lockdowns, during Newsom completely violating his own lockdowns, this has been picking up steam a ton.
The people trying to recall him are now halfway to their effort.
They need three million signatures.
They've already got one and a half million.
And they still have, what, like two years to go?
No, I'm sorry.
They don't have that long.
They've got until March, though, to reach the threshold.
It's a long time.
They're getting one and a half million already.
They just need another one and a half million and they've got three, four months to do it.
That's pretty good.
I've left California.
I'm in Tennessee now.
I've taken a look at some videos back in California.
People are not happy with this.
You've got conservatives who are not happy.
Even some liberals are realizing this is not a good idea.
There's a video that went viral of a guy jumping up at, it looks like a Costco or a Home Depot or something like that, standing on a table, I guess a Walmart maybe, who knows, screaming through a bullhorn about how terrible Gavin Newsom is.
Take a listen.
You know why we're under this lockdown right now?
Because all the information is coming out about COVID, and they know it's a farce.
You must not do this.
If you continue, this is the life that you will have.
Just keep going, guys.
Keep going.
Don't tell me I have the right.
You know what?
Governor Newsom doesn't have the right to shut us down, to make you wear a mask.
That's right.
All right, people, you know, that's right.
We've got to stand out for ourselves because this governor is going to keep us locked down until we do something about it.
And I want to know, are you going to let this happen?
I like this guy.
This is my kind of guy.
And the right has a decision to make right now.
As we see Mitch McConnell saying Joe Biden's the president-elect, basically everybody who has anything to do with this has given up at this point.
They've said, okay, it's going to be Joe Biden.
I think there are a lot of Republicans who are relieved about that.
I think there are a lot of establishmentarian Republicans who sometimes they talk good game about, oh, you know, yeah, abortion's bad, give me your money.
Yeah, no, abortion, it's bad, and yeah, and we should stop immigration, too.
Give me your money, donate, donate, vote for me, vote for me.
Then they don't do anything about it, and they don't actually want to upset that establishment at all.
They are, to use a phrase I've mentioned on this show a number of times, court jester conservatives.
Their job is to sort of put on a little show and legitimize the kingdom of liberalism, that establishment.
We have a decision to make.
We all want perfect candidates.
We want them to talk like Reagan and fight like Trump and look like, I don't know, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
We want perfect supporters.
We want all this.
Ask yourself this question.
That guy yelling on top of that table at the bullhorn.
Are you on that guy's side?
I am.
I'm on that guy's side.
Maybe that guy has some fringe opinions about some things.
I don't know.
I don't know the guy.
Maybe that guy doesn't go to cocktail parties very nicely.
Maybe he doesn't have like a really nice fitted suit and a really beautiful silk tie that'll look real.
I'm on that guy's side.
If you said, Michael, you can right now be friends with Pete Buttigieg, who's, look, he's so smart.
He's so polished.
He's kind of a moderate.
Look, just go.
You can be on that guy's side or you can be on the side of that screaming guy at the Costco.
I'll take the screaming guy at the Costco.
That's my guy.
Republicans need to make this decision.
Are we going to defend?
I see the argument.
I said, look, we're conservative and let's just conserve this liberal establishment.
Okay, I'm not interested in that.
I don't want to do that at all.
I want to conserve something a little deeper and more important than that.
And there's going to be a civil war within the Republican Party.
Are we the party of...
Guys wearing nice suits and billionaires and the party of, yeah, maybe you keep the borders open.
It's fine.
You know, you got to ship some jobs overseas.
It's fine.
GDP is going to go up.
Are we going to be, oh, forget about, come on, the cultural issues and abortion.
It's not, we'll talk about it, but it's, we're not going to do anything.
Are we going to be that party?
Are we going to be the party of the guy screaming on top of the table at Costco?
I want to be the party of that guy.
That is not going to be boring.
You know, it's nice and easy.
People make a lot of money when things are boring because they're predictable.
Everyone knows their role.
It's very efficient.
When things are not boring, well then a lot more is up in the air.
You've got some inefficiencies, you've got some threats to entrenched interests.
I want to be the party of not boring.
I want to be the party of making news.
I want to be the party of no news is bad news because the progressive left keeps on going further and further.
I want to do something.
I want to fight back.
Republicans are going to have to hold their leaders' feet to the flames on this point.
Because I think that the established right believes, okay, Trump, wow, that was weird, huh?
Some weird stuff.
Back to normal.
Back to liberalism.
Let's hope not.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
show.
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I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture because culture drives politics and it drives everything else.
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Those are fundamental.
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