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Feb. 19, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
51:33
Ep. 704 - Two Different Countries

Biden’s COVID advisor can’t explain why the Left’s policies aren’t working, the White House leaves the door open to “reparations,” and Kamala Harris amasses more power in the West Wing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Democrats understand coronavirus.
Republicans do not understand coronavirus.
Democrats Whether at the state level, the local level, now I guess at the national level, have handled the epidemic well.
Republicans are responsible for every single death.
That's what we've been told.
We were told this by Joe Biden even when he was on the campaign trail.
He told us that Donald Trump is responsible for every single COVID death.
So presumably, if a Democrat had been in charge from the beginning of the epidemic, nobody would have died, right?
Well, there's just one problem with that, which is if you look at a Republican state like Florida, did not really shut down ever.
It's basically wide open right now.
And you look at a Democrat state like California, completely shut down some of the most onerous restrictions in the whole country.
When you look at how the virus is affecting both of those states, looks pretty much the same.
Those states are more or less indistinguishable.
Joe Biden's coronavirus advisor can't quite explain it.
Contrast states like Florida and California basically in lockdown, and their numbers aren't that different from Florida.
Well, good morning, Stephanie.
Look, there's so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that's just a little bit beyond our explanation.
What we do know is that the more careful people are, the more they mask and social distance, and the quicker we vaccinate, the quicker it goes away and the less it spreads.
Hold on.
We don't know that.
Actually, the whole premise of the question is that we don't know that.
If we did know that, then Florida would be in a much worse place right now on the virus than California is.
Because Florida, basically not doing anything...
To social distance and mandate masks everywhere.
California forcing all that sort of stuff.
They're in the same place.
So we don't know it.
He says, he admits, yeah, we don't really know anything about this virus.
But the one thing we do know is you got to do all the stuff the Democrats want.
We know that works.
No, we don't.
But then he gives the more honest answer.
But we have got to get better visibility into variants.
We don't know what role they play, large events, etc.
But, you know, this is, as we all have learned by this time, this is a virus that continues to surprise us.
It's very hard to predict.
And, you know, all around the country, we've got to continue to do a better job.
And I think we are, but we're not done yet.
Yes, the virus does surprise us.
Yes, there's a lot of stuff that you don't know.
But that is not stopping you.
Genius expert, you, Biden White House, you, liberal establishment, from exploiting the virus to foist these crazy policies on all of us.
They don't know very much about the virus, but they know enough to exploit the virus to cram a whole new political system down our throats.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Camo Man, responding to Bill Gates' promise that we've got to stop eating real meat, start eating fake meat.
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This is true.
It's not just a joke.
This does happen.
I remember vividly at the beginning of the epidemic when everyone was hoarding food because they didn't know anything.
How serious the virus was, how long we were going to be locked in.
You wouldn't find any food in the grocery stores.
Looked like images out of 1970s Soviet Union.
And so the meat section would be totally cleared, the bread would be totally cleared, empty shelves, except...
For the fake vegan meat, except for the impossible sausage or whatever, that they'd be full and say, you know, I would rather starve to death than eat this crappy fake meat.
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The decisions that are being made with regard to the coronavirus are political decisions.
We've said this ad nauseum.
We don't need to get into this much more.
They are not scientific decisions.
I guess there's a sort of scientific patina to them, but they are political decisions.
By definition, any decision that a government worker makes that's going to affect the way that we behave, the way we live our lives, that's going to affect our rights, by definition, that is political.
And what it represents is a new hierarchy.
Certain people are given special privileges based on the ruling ideology.
And we will get into that ideology a lot on this show.
Certain people are given special privileges.
Certain people are disadvantaged.
There is a system of worth and value.
And the virus shows you this clearly because you have to prioritize what people get treatment.
You have to prioritize what people are going to get the vaccine.
There's a finite supply.
There's a limited rollout.
And so certain people are going to get it.
Certain people are not.
Now, it would make sense to me Since we're supposed to have equal justice under the law for all American citizens, it would make sense to me to roll out the vaccine based on people's risk levels.
I am, I think, a healthy 30-year-old guy.
There is absolutely no reason for me to be prioritized on this vaccine.
Frankly, even if there were an unlimited supply, I'm not sure that I would get it.
Not because I think it's going to install a I don't know what the conspiracy theories are.
It's going to install 5G in my blood or something.
That's not the reason I wouldn't get the vaccine.
Actually, my cell service is a little bit weak, so if I could become a human hotspot, I might consider it.
That's not why.
It's just because I don't need the vaccine.
So I'm not going to get it, and I'm sorry if that offends the liberal regime that insists that we all need to get the vaccine, but I just don't really think I need it, so I'm not in any rush to get it.
However, if you are, I don't know, 75, 85, 95, probably you should consider getting the vaccine, and you should be prioritized in the list as the government decides how this rollout is going to work.
California's taking a different approach.
The California vaccine guidelines are prioritizing various groups, including, I kid you not, marijuana workers.
Marijuana workers, people in the pot industry, are being prioritized over teachers, to name just one group.
And this is to promote Equity.
What is equity?
I don't know.
It sure doesn't seem like equality.
Can't be equality, right?
If some groups are going to get it, some groups are not.
That's not equality.
They're calling it equity.
According to the, quote, updated COVID-19 vaccine allocation guidelines from the California Department of Health, medical marijuana workers are prioritized ahead of people in education, ahead of people working in child care services, as well as many people over the age of 65.
So, any regime of rolling out the vaccine is going to give some people access over others.
It seems to me reasonable and equitable and just to give it to the older people because the older people actually are at some risk from the virus.
No, they're not doing that in California.
They have different political priorities.
It's up to the state of California to do that.
We all...
We have a right in self-government to shape the way we want to live.
And we need to get beyond just the procedural questions of do we have this right, how do we govern ourselves, to the substantive stuff.
What regime do we want to live in?
Who do we want to prioritize here?
Do we want to prioritize the old people or do we want to prioritize the potheads?
There is a new cast system being pushed, and it's not usually being pushed on the basis of how much choom you like to smoke, how much of that sin spinach you like to light up in your bowl.
Really, what is being pushed as the determinant here is race and Jen Psaki, our favorite current White House press secretary, was just asked what the Biden administration thought about reparations.
Reparations for what, you might ask?
Why reparations for slavery?
Jen Psaki does not commit to it entirely, but she also doesn't shoot it down.
Well, he's supported a study of reparations, which I believe is what's being discussed, and studying the continuing impacts of slavery, which is being discussed in this hearing on H.R. 40, I believe it is.
And he continues to demonstrate his commitment to take comprehensive action to address the systemic racism that persists today.
Obviously, having that study is a part of that, but he has signed an executive order on his first day Which would begin to deliver on his commitment to having an all-cross-government approach to addressing racial inequality and making sure equity is a part of his entire policy agenda.
But he certainly would support a study of reparations.
He understands that we don't need a study to take action right now in systemic racism, so he wants to take actions within his own government in the meantime.
Okay, I can't take any more of the jargon in the gobbledygook because it sounds like a big, long non-answer.
And part of the job of the press secretary is to evade questions.
But I don't think that we can, those of us who are reasonable people who don't believe that a system of reparations is going to help anything in the country and actually will hurt a lot of political questions in our country...
I don't think we can just rest easy and say, oh, don't worry, Biden, he's a moderate.
He's not going to do anything radical.
Everything that Joe Biden has done since entering the White House has thrown away this assumption that he's going to govern as a moderate.
He has governed in probably the most radical way he possibly can.
Listen to what she says.
She says, well, he can do things for racial equity now, and he's doing that.
And he could take action, but there's going to be a study...
And a commission, and they're going to study the commission and review reparations.
Hold on.
Why do we need a study or a commission or a review about reparations?
We know the facts of the case.
We had legal slavery in the country for a long time, ending in 1865.
Kind of strange, actually.
The first officially declared slave, you know, in the American tradition of slavery, meaning not someone who was given slavery as a punishment for a crime, for instance, but someone who was arbitrarily declared a slave for life, was a man named John Kasor.
Black man in the United States.
And the slave owner was also a black man.
His name was Anthony Johnson.
It's very strange.
Obviously slavery became this much more racialized system later on.
But the first sort of officially declared slave owner, in a way that we would recognize it in the United States, was a black Angolan guy.
Pretty weird.
And it raises all these questions for reparations.
For instance, if reparations are going to be given on the basis of race, do recent immigrants or the children of recent immigrants get reparations?
Say a guy from Nigeria comes to America in 1982.
Do he and his descendants get reparations?
Well...
If systemic racism exists, probably they should get reparations, right?
Because, yeah, sure, their ancestors were not slaves, but, you know, they live in a system where black people are constantly mistreated, so, yeah, I guess they should get reparations.
Should the descendants of Anthony Johnson, the first officially declared slave owner in America, should they get reparations?
I don't know.
I mean, they would be black, or at least part black.
Would they have to pay reparations to the descendants of John Kayser?
I don't know.
So that's murky.
But what is a study going to do?
We know the basic facts.
There was slavery.
It happened, you know, however long ago.
150 some odd years ago.
What are we going to do now?
This is a subject for political debate.
Not for some ridiculous bureaucratic team to study and then come to an answer.
Because I think the answer is probably predetermined by the progressive left.
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The left uses this tactic all the time, and Biden is being a little on the nose about it, but I think a lot of people don't recognize it when they see it.
When the left has a radical proposal that they want to implement, but they know the people aren't ready for it yet, they will gradually get people accustomed to it by commissioning a study or a commission to review the facts and then come to the predetermined Conclusion.
New York Times had a headline, shows this perfectly.
Here's a tweet from the Times.
A Chicago commission listed five statues of Abraham Lincoln among dozens of monuments that it said should be reviewed by the public as part of a project started in the wake of last year's protests against racism and police violence.
Okay, it sounds very bureaucratic, right?
Very clinical language.
What they're saying is, we need to review Abraham Lincoln.
What is there to review?
We know Abraham Lincoln.
He's one of the most famous men in our nation's history.
A great man long revered.
There's no review that can be done that is going to shed new light on Abraham Lincoln.
This is a political debate.
Do you want to take down the Lincoln statues or not?
Do you want a country that admires its forebear Abraham Lincoln or a country that reviles Abraham Lincoln and all of the other forebears?
Because, by the way, if you're going to get rid of Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves...
On the basis of racism or something, then you're going to get rid of everyone.
And you're going to realize, finally, you're going to get it through your thick head, squishy Republicans.
Squishy moderates.
You're going to get it through your thick heads that they're not just going after Robert E. Lee on the left.
They're not just going after, I don't know, Thomas Jefferson.
They're not just going after Andrew Jackson.
They're going after Washington.
They're going after Lincoln.
They're going after everybody.
Everyone who can be identified with the traditional American regime, they've got to go because the left doesn't like that regime.
So they want to knock down that history and rebuild a new history.
They know that right now the American people are not ready for that.
They wouldn't accept that if the commission just came out and voted and said we're ditching Lincoln.
So they review and they study and they slow walk it until it just seems inevitable.
Now this, I think, is offensive.
I think the calls for reparations are offensive.
I think the new racial caste system that the left is pushing is offensive, not just to white people and Asian people who, for instance, are disadvantaged through the legal discrimination of affirmative action, but they're also offensive to black people and Hispanic people who are advantaged by affirmative but they're also offensive to black people and Hispanic people who
What affirmative action says is that black people and Hispanic people can't cut it, so they've got to be given a special break and they've got to be given bonus points on their tests 'cause that's the only way they can get into the good schools, right?
That's what it says.
That's the only effective affirmative action, so it's all it could possibly say.
Don't you find that a little bit offensive?
I think it's pretty offensive.
I know Clarence Thomas said it was very offensive.
He wrote about this in a memoir.
He said...
Even though I had a degree from Yale Law School, people assumed I only got in because of affirmative action and I felt the sting of racial bigotry.
A lot of people talk about that.
Joe Biden doesn't help things when he says genuinely offensive things on the basis of race.
The other portion is a lot of people don't know how to register.
Not everybody in the community, in the Hispanic and the African American community, particularly in rural areas that are distant and or inner city districts, know how to use, know how to get online to determine how to get in line for that COVID vaccination at the Walgreens or at the particular store.
You know, man, come on, man.
Black people and Hispanic people, like my good buddy Corn Pop, they can't use the internet.
They don't know, man.
They don't know how to use the internet.
This is the latest in a long series of racially offensive comments that Joe Biden has made.
For instance, when he said that poor kids are just as smart as white kids, conflating, I guess, poor and black are synonymous and rich and white are synonymous for Joe Biden.
I guess for kind of the politically correct woke regime, that's true as well.
Wasn't it Joe Biden who said of Barack Obama that he was the first clean and articulate black man and that's a That's a fairytale, man.
Come on, man.
Race is a lot of things that are pretty offensive.
And people knock him for it, but it doesn't matter.
He's not going to pay any political price.
And I think conservatives have been making the point that I just made a moment ago for a long time.
They say, we all should unite against affirmative action because it's so offensive and it's racist.
And you, you Democrats, you care about racism, but you're pushing this policy?
No, come on.
Be persuaded by my logic.
They don't care.
They don't care.
It's fine to acknowledge this.
I think we should have all the facts before us.
But the left doesn't care because they know that racial discrimination is a very powerful tool.
Actually, there's a good book by Mike Gonzalez from the Heritage Foundation.
I think it's called The Plot to Change America, which is about how the black civil rights movement is a unique phenomenon among racial issues in America because we had...
American slavery.
We had Jim Crow.
It was, broadly speaking, racial.
Anthony Johnson and John Kasor aside, you know, these unique cases aside, broadly racial, and so we've got to grapple with that, and that's why the civil rights movement developed the way it did.
And then...
Left-wingers from the 1960s and 70s, funded largely by left-wing foundations like the Ford Foundation, realized this was a very effective way to amass political power, so they started to create new identity groups on the basis of race, one being Hispanic and Latino.
The idea that all Hispanic people are sort of just one thing, that people in Spain and Mexico and Guatemala and Argentina and Peru and Brazil, that they're all just one thing is pretty weird and it's pretty new.
That idea is only about 50 years old and a minority of Latino people...
Have identified primarily in this way, according to various surveys.
But it was effective.
They then did it to Asian people.
They tried to do it during the Obama administration to Middle Eastern people, Middle Eastern, North Africa.
They tried to create the category called MENA. It didn't really catch on.
And it shows you how farcical the whole thing is, because historically in the United States, people from the Middle East and North Africa have been categorized as white.
Linda Sarsour, who was one of the activists behind the MENA category, famously said that the reason she wears a hijab is because without a hijab, she's just another boring white lady in New York City.
It shows you, if you're trying to create a new identity group, if you're categorized as a white person, then you try to re-categorize yourself as an allegedly aggrieved minority group, it probably shows you that there's not so much privilege there in being identified as a white person, but actually there's social currency in being able to claim victimhood.
There is a lot of power there, and so I don't think arguments against this sort of thing on the basis of, you know, good faith arguments are really going to work.
Joy Reid was one of the many left-wingers yesterday who went after Rush Limbaugh and called him a racist and a bigot and all that sort of stuff, which is complete BS. Just ask Bo Snerdly, right?
Just ask Rush's longtime producer, who does not have a lot of white privilege, let's say.
The claim that Rush Limbaugh is some racial bigots is completely preposterous, but the left is going to throw it because they call all of us racial bigots and racism to them is just a synonym for the word bad.
So they use it without any basis.
They accuse David Webb, for instance, of having white privilege, as one caller did on his radio show, without realizing, of course, that David Webb is black.
So Joy Reid was throwing this argument at them.
But listen to...
What she considers to be the worst thing that Rush Limbaugh did.
Rush ultimately got his way.
Rush Limbaugh reached millions of listeners via his golden microphone, with his shows airing in small stations out in rural America that even Fox News couldn't reach, hardening rural white listeners and weaponizing white male grievance.
That's the phrase I want you to focus in on.
Joy Reid is very upset that Rush Limbaugh allegedly hardened white male grievance.
I dispute the premise that she's pushing here.
I don't think that Rush Limbaugh was a racist.
I don't think he attempted to inflame racial animosities or anything like that.
But I want to take the hypothetical here.
What if he had I don't like the idea of racial grievance politics.
I don't want to speak to white racial grievance.
The left loves racial grievance politics.
They are pushing racial grievance politics right now.
They're pushing reparations for slavery 156 years after the abolition of slavery.
It seems to me that the left, primarily, above all their other political agenda, they are pushing racial grievance politics.
And Joy Reid is very upset when there's even the prospect of white grievance politics.
What do you think is going to happen?
If you convince everyone that race is the most important thing...
Well, then people are going to believe you, aren't they?
They're going to accept that kind of grievance politics.
Joy's trying to attack Rush here.
She's projecting.
She's projecting what the left is doing.
They're absolutely shocked at the...
Hypothetical, natural consequences to the kind of dirty politics they've been pushing for a very long time.
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The left has foisted on us a new system, a new understanding of ourselves politically, whereby grievance is currency and racial and sexual identity is paramount beyond national identity, beyond religious identity, beyond even local identity.
Race and sex, that's what they're pushing.
And if you transgress the new system, you will get in a lot of trouble.
A former Massachusetts high school football coach is now suing the Dedham Public School District.
Why?
Because he was fired.
Why was he fired?
Because he disagreed privately with the radical political and racial curriculum that was being taught in the schools.
His two daughters were being taught a curriculum premised on Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter is, in a way, it's a racial organization, but it's also a very radical ideological organization.
It's an explicitly Marxist movement, according to the movement's founders.
It seeks, among other things, according to its website, to dismantle the Western prescribed nuclear family.
Radical stuff.
This high school coach and parent I don't really think this belongs in the social studies classroom.
You can learn about it maybe as an historical phenomenon, but you can't push this sort of thing because then you're not teaching students history really.
You're not teaching them even philosophy.
You're pushing this very narrow kind of ideological perspective on students and you're delegitimizing all of the others.
And by the way, if you're pushing Marxism, then you are undercutting our traditional American philosophy.
If you are pushing this highly racialized vision of politics, you are undercutting the deracialized politics that we have embraced in America, certainly in recent years.
You can only get one or the other.
He said, I don't think you should be doing this.
He got fired for it.
Now he's suing.
I think he should sue.
I think we have to expose the system for what it is and have the wherewithal to hold the system up to its rhetoric.
Let me bring that down to earth because that sounds very abstract.
In the United Kingdom, so not in the United States, A white civil servant is suing for racial and sexual discrimination.
This is in London.
A white male civil servant is filing a lawsuit.
Matthew Parr has a salary of £134,000 per year.
That's a very high salary, right?
We're talking, this guy's making a lot of money.
He also has a £7,900 living allowance.
Wow, man, this guy, how do I get that civil service job?
But he's going to sue because he learned that a black woman, Wend Williams, was hired and makes significantly more money, an extra 50,000 pounds a year, it seems.
She had accepted a lower offer, but then she was just automatically given a higher offer because the civil service was afraid that maybe she was being paid less than someone else.
So, ordinarily we hear in the United States that, you know, people who are not white and not men make much less money for doing the same job.
And this just isn't true.
But when you factor in education, experience, all these sorts of things, hours worked, those pay gaps disappear.
In the civil service, though, you actually can sort of compare these things.
And so shocking because it upends the usual ideology we're being fed.
The white guy is being paid less than the black lady.
He absolutely should sue for this.
I do not think that we ought to have a politics.
That is rooted primarily around race or primarily around sex.
But that's what the left is pushing.
And if that is the dominant regime, then that dread, awful, worst sort of individual you could possibly imagine, the straight white male, now with gender ideology, I guess you'd have to say the straight white male who knows that he's a male, has to push back against injustice.
The system, broadly, is rife with injustice, and of course, we need to push back against that injustice.
I think a lot of people would not want to do this.
Well, first of all, this guy here is making a ton of money, so he's really got nothing to complain about.
And I think a lot of white guys don't want to be accused of being racist, so they'd say, oh, I'll just let it go.
Okay, these other people are being paid more because of their race and sex.
Okay, it's fine, whatever, it's all no big deal.
But it is a big deal.
It's wrong for everybody.
You know, we often hear from the left, racism is a problem for everybody.
Injustice for anybody is an injustice for everybody.
Well, in a way, that's true.
If you've got an unjust system, it is your obligation to push back against that sort of thing.
Because it is.
It is terrible for everybody.
Now, Joe Biden is fanning those flames.
And he's done this for a lot of his career.
You remember when he said that Mitt Romney wanted to put black people back in chains back in 2012?
Bad stuff.
You know, he's always harping on that sort of thing.
But it's unclear how much longer Joe Biden is going to be around.
The White House is already pushing out that Kamala Harris is taking on more and more responsibility.
Kamala tweeted the other day.
She said, Today I spoke with President Emmanuel Macron of France.
We discussed COVID-19, climate change, supporting democracy at home and around the world, and regional challenges.
The President and I look forward to working with President Macron to build a better future for our two countries.
She's taking other phone calls with other This is unusual for a vice president, but it's because obviously Joe Biden is not all there.
We've all heard the bizarre slips.
We've all seen that he just is not the guy he was even five or ten years ago.
So as I often say, I'm a conservative optimist in the sense that a conservative pessimist says things can't get any worse.
I think things can get a lot worse, and they're obviously grooming Kamala Harris for this.
An update, though, on mortality.
Bob Dole.
Bob Dole, 97 years old, was recently diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.
Very sad.
I really like Bob Dole.
And it's really sad that he was diagnosed that way.
And he put out a statement.
He said, my first treatment will begin on Monday.
You've got to give this guy credit.
You've got to give Bob Dole credit.
I've always admired him, not even because I felt he was the most conservative, rock-ribbed Republican, but this guy, he's a fighter, man.
This guy is a war hero.
He's a total fighter.
97-year-old saying, I'm going to undergo treatment starting on Monday.
More power to him.
He's absolutely in our prayers.
Bob Dole is the first presidential candidate I ever voted for.
You might say, Michael, you were six years old when Bob Dole ran in 96.
That's true.
I paid some attention.
As much as any six-year-old can pay attention to the news, I was paying attention to it.
All I knew about the race, Bob Dole was a war hero, and Bill Clinton was a draft dodger, and I liked Dole, and I didn't like Clinton.
My mother was going to vote for Bill Clinton.
She voted for Republicans a lot, but, you know, some of her politics were kind of interesting.
And I begged her to vote for Dole.
She let me go into the voting booth with her, as I did actually a lot when I was a child, and she let me pull the lever for Bob Dole.
I'm sure the FBI is going to investigate me now for voter fraud.
No, wait, voter fraud doesn't exist, so never mind.
In any case, well wishes to Bob Dole.
Love, love that that guy is a fighter.
He also, he's the only living GOP nominee who showed up to the convention in 2016.
You know, the Bushes boycotted 2016, which I felt was very ugly, very unseemly.
I understand why they did it, but it was too bad.
I always gave Bob Dole a lot of credit, but he actually kind of stuck it out with Trump.
So, in any case, best wishes to Bob Dole.
We'll see, though.
We've got a lot of change coming on.
There's an old generation of politicians that is passing on either into the next life or passing on out of political...
Power of political importance.
And what is coming up, I can't say I'm too hopeful for it.
If Joe Biden is the old, Kamala is the new, that's not great.
if a system that had a lot of problems, but more or less at least spoke to equality before the law, justice, if that's passing out and we've got this new politically correct, radical system of racial and sexual grievance coming up, that is not great at all.
We've got to stand up against that sort of thing.
I don't care how uncomfortable it is.
I don't care how unpopular it makes you.
I don't care how vulnerable it makes you, even.
You've got to stand up for justice.
And we have got to get to the mailbag.
Before we do that, head on over to dailywire.com.
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We'll be right back with the Mailbag.
My favorite time of the week, the mailbag.
Let's get right into it.
First question from Julie.
Hey Michael, I was wondering, if I am a person who identifies as a fetus, does that give my mom the right to kill me?
Legally, it does.
It does.
It hasn't been tried in court yet, but legally it does give your mother that right.
I'm sure some parents of teenagers might be thinking about that right now.
But of course, you actually raise a great point here, which is, I think that identity is objective.
Meaning, I think that we are individuals.
We have individual souls.
Our souls have a relation to our bodies.
We have a purpose here, which is to know God and enjoy Him forever.
God knows us, endows us with rational faculties to perceive the objective world.
It can be objectively stated that I am a man.
You can see some evidence of this.
My Adam's apple and other things below the desk, which we don't need to get to right now.
It's a family show.
So I think that's all true.
Now the left...
Takes this sort of subjective view to identity, where you see this in the racial question, right?
You say, well, I identify.
I might be, you know, biracial, but I identify with this race and not the other race.
They take it, obviously, with gender.
I am this sex, but I identify as this sex, therefore I am that sex.
But they take it to human life as well, which is, you'll see, everyone in the liberal media will celebrate the royal baby.
Right?
If a celebrity has a miscarriage, there was very famously a celebrity who had a miscarriage this year, I forget her name, and it was a big cause in the liberal media, and they said how sorry they were.
But, of course, if the celebrity did not recognize the baby as being a baby, then it wouldn't have been a problem at all.
Right?
If you do not recognize the fetus as a human being, then it's fine.
It's actually celebrated.
It's a good thing to kill them.
So you can take this crazy identity politics to its extreme and say, well, all right, well, I identify as a fetus.
I identify as whatever.
I identify as a leftist, teerist, temporal.
I identify as my neighbor's dog who's barking outside of my home studio as I'm snowed in here in Nashville.
Next question from Mario.
Hey Michael, I'm 29 years old.
I'm in California.
I'm a conservative and Catholic.
I have a question about relationships and marriage.
I've been with my girlfriend now for about a year and a half.
She is great.
She's everything a guy like me could possibly want, which makes me very confused because for about a year now, I can't shake the feeling that she's not the one.
My question is, should I cast my doubts aside and ask her to marry me, or should I listen to my gut and pursue the one?
Is this fair to my girlfriend or future wife, or is this one of those, think about your own happiness situations?
Thanks.
Mario, I'm going to give you very difficult advice.
It's not going to be very clear advice, but I, you know, I'm not going to say do this, don't do this, but I hope this will clarify your situation.
It's advice that I rarely hear conservatives give.
Sometimes I hear people say, you'll know the one, pursue the one, kind of this purely romantic notion.
Sometimes I hear conservatives say, it doesn't really matter who you marry, marriage is an objective thing, just do these certain things, you'll be fine, share values, whatever.
I married the one.
Not everyone gets to marry the one.
I get to marry the one.
I sometimes, I kid you not, I will wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because I have a nightmare about marrying some ex-girlfriend or something and how terrible my life would be if I had not married sweet little Alisa, who is 100% the one.
We've known each other since we were 10 years old, and I basically always knew it, though I was a little confused perhaps at some times, as one is when one is a teenager.
I speak from experience.
It is absolutely great to marry the one.
That said, marriage is a real institution.
It is a process.
And you hear happily married people say, you know, when they're 50 years down the road, they say, I love my wife more today than I did 50 years ago.
The reason for that is you grow together or you grow apart.
And when you grow in this union, you become one flesh.
And that actually does something.
So marriage does transform you.
And two people who maybe, you know, obviously arranged marriage was the norm in most societies throughout history.
People who maybe they didn't know each other very well.
They didn't have this kind of romantic love.
Through marriage, if you do marriage right, we'll grow together because it's a real thing.
It's objective.
It's a sacrament.
You grow together and they will end up loving each other.
I think it was Benjamin Disraeli's wife, the famous British prime minister.
She said, I know that Dizzy married me for my money, but I think if he had to do it again, he would marry me for love.
That's a profound statement.
So you have to ascertain a few things.
Is this just you?
Is this you being sentimental?
Is this maybe you have some vision of someone else and maybe that's an infatuation.
That's not really love.
Well, okay, you don't want to let that infatuation or some sort of flighty idea carry you away and ruin a good relationship.
But are you, on the other hand, maybe thinking too clinically about this?
Oh, yeah, she checks the boxes, but there's no spark there.
I will tell you, as a passionate person of Latin descent from the Isles of Sicily, it is good to have a little bit of passion.
It is really good.
I mean, it's often when people write in asking me for relationship advice.
Should I date this girl?
Should I not?
I say, well, I don't know.
Is she hot?
I don't know.
Do you find her attractive?
I mean, come on, man.
You can't be too clinical about all of this.
You shouldn't only pursue that.
You should also look at virtue, shared value, shared perspective on the world.
Some way that you can grow together.
I need you to balance those two things.
The passionate part is important.
You shouldn't discount that.
And the serious, you know, don't let flights of fancy carry you away so that you run off with some lunatic just because it's really passionate for a brief moment.
Both of those are very important.
Both of those are going to matter in your marriage.
And you're going to have to, as with all things in this finite world, Keep both of those in your mind.
Not allow your passions to run away with you, but not be so cold and clinical that you have a cold marriage.
I'd need more details to give you a yes or no on your girlfriend or wife, but I hope that helps clarify it.
From Caleb.
Hey Michael, my wife recently told me I'm going to be a dad.
Oh great, congratulations.
I'm ecstatic about having children.
This is my first.
Also scared out of my mind.
How did you react when you found out you were going to be a dad?
What do you know now that you wish you had known back then?
I reacted very happily, but I wasn't surprised because, as some of you know, I'm Catholic.
I've mentioned that every so often.
I'm practicing.
I'm going to keep on practicing until I get it right.
And yet I didn't have a child until two years into my marriage.
The reason for that is it just didn't happen right away.
So we're kind of, you know, working on it.
I won't be too graphic about it, you know, because trying is not the worst thing in the world, I think, for a young married couple.
But when it finally did happen, I thought, oh, good, finally.
Goodness gracious, that's great.
And, you know, I was a little worried just about the health of the baby, health of my wife.
Luckily, thank God, both turned out great.
What do I wish I knew?
I wish I knew...
How hard it is on the mother.
I'm not saying this to suck up to the mothers in the room.
I just didn't realize.
I didn't realize that, especially if you're nursing, that the woman basically just never gets to sleep.
And I'm, you know, I'm not the most modern man in the world, so I'm not exactly sitting up.
Well, biologically, it would be very difficult for me to nurse the poor little baby.
He probably wouldn't like it very much.
But also, we're a little bit more sort of...
I try to get more sleep and then go into work and, you know...
My wife is a little more nurturing than me, taking care of the baby a little bit more than me.
So I didn't realize how hard it is on the woman.
I mean, it is really, really hard.
And then if you have a C-section or something like that, it's really, really, really tough on the woman.
So I would have tried to prepare a little bit more, maybe get some family to visit, maybe get, you know, a nanny or something.
I would have planned that out for the first few weeks at least.
But that's wonderful.
Congratulations.
Hope you have as much fun as I'm having.
From Anthony, Dear Michael, do you think it would be useful to start talking about liberals and leftists in the media and other institutions as having implicit biases against conservatives and conservative viewpoints?
Thanks for all you do.
The problem with that is that the biases are not implicit, they're explicit.
They're telling you them all of the time.
And when someone is doing something explicitly, it probably doesn't help to call it to their attention.
Also, the idea of implicit biases and that that should guide our politics is just very silly and stupid and it's a left-wing idea.
And I don't think we really benefit From playing into the left's language, I think the way the left transforms culture is through language, primarily.
I just wrote a book about this that kind of studies over the past hundred years how the left has transformed language and how conservatives have completely failed to fix it and maybe what we can do to fix it.
That book is called Speechless, by the way.
Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
You can pre-order it right now wherever books are sold.
So I just don't think we should play into their language.
I think we should use our own language.
Use good, sturdy, traditional language, which is more evocative, and force them to use our language, for that matter.
Right now they force us to use their language and we often give in.
I don't think we should do that.
And I don't think we should pretend that language doesn't matter.
I think we should actually impel them to use our more correct language.
From Victor.
Hey Michael, I remember you saying a while back that something that helps you have such a great memory was memorizing poems.
What poems do you recommend I try to memorize?
Oh, where to begin?
Shakespeare, you know, is probably the top of the list because when you memorize Shakespeare, one, you'll have...
Instant recall to some of the greatest lines in the English language.
But it's also one that'll help you pick up girls at cocktail parties.
It's sort of impressive.
And he's easy to memorize because he's such a great writer.
He writes in this beautiful meter with all this beautiful language.
So I recommend Shakespeare.
If you want something a little more modern, Robert Frost is great to memorize.
I've memorized a zillion Robert Frost poems.
King James Bible.
Similar to Shakespeare, a great thing to memorize will make you more fluent in our language.
And I don't just mean in the various words and sentence structures.
I mean just Shakespeare and the King James Bible have crafted so much of the way that we speak and think that if you start out memorizing those guys, you will be just better acquainted with our whole culture.
From Hayden.
Dear Mr.
Knowles, there's a great number of conservative commentators who are saying Donald Trump running in 2024 is a terrible idea and we should not nominate him.
I was wondering what you think of the rebirth of the Never Trump movement and do you think Trump should run for a second term in 2024?
Yeah, Never Trump never died.
There's always been that kind of strain that never Trump then embodied in the right.
They were the Rockefeller Republicans back in the Goldwater and Reagan days.
They were the Gerald Ford Republicans later on also during the Reagan days.
The Reagan era kind of spanned a while when you consider his first entrance to national politics.
They were the Bush Republicans.
They were the They've always been around and they're going to be around into the future.
I still like Donald Trump a great deal.
I am still a great supporter of Donald Trump's.
I think that Donald Trump was an excellent president, at least relative to the other presidents of my lifetime.
So I'm not opposed to the idea of him running in 2024.
I don't know that he'll do it.
It would be very difficult for him to do.
The deck would be so stacked against him.
I don't know that he would want to do it.
He already got to do it.
He already got to be president.
And he'll also be older then, you know, and I think maybe Republicans might want a younger candidate.
That said, he's a great force in politics.
So I'm not opposed to the idea of him running.
But Now, I guess the question that moves forward is, who else do we have?
I think that's going to affect some of his calculations, so we'll just have to find out.
From John.
Hello!
Thank you for taking my question.
How'd you know I was going to take your question, John?
I think conservatives should go all in promoting the economic system distributism, which was promoted by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.
Do you agree that distributism should be part of the path forward for conservatives?
Distributism, for those who don't know...
It's this kind of third option that was popular in the early 20th century.
It was a third option to capitalism and socialism.
And distributism kind of rejects both of those.
And it's based in part on Catholic social teaching and the teaching of Pope Leo XIII, whom I think is terrific.
And Leo XIII is one of the Popes who spoke out most aggressively against socialism.
So I like the idea of it, and I love Hilary Belloc and Chesterton, both of whom were great conservatives.
I don't know very much about the system of distributism, and something tells me it's a little too clever by half.
I've never really seen it put into practice, and never became all that popular.
So I'll look into it, and I'll keep an open mind.
I'll broaden your question, though.
Should conservatives take seriously criticisms of capitalism?
Yes.
For too long, we have not taken that seriously.
Capitalism, the word, it's a word popularized by Marxists.
I don't think we should accept that framing.
And part of distributism's claim here is that what we understand today to be capitalism is a system that came out of the Enlightenment.
It's a modern, kind of liberal system, actually.
These words get a little convoluted when we're talking about terms that have changed over time.
But yes, should conservatives...
Be wary of capitalism.
Recognize that capitalism, such as it is, can be a wonderful instrument to human flourishing, but it's not an end unto itself to be made an idol of.
Abso-freaking-lutely.
I know that'll ruffle a lot of feathers from the kind of conservative establishment of the last 20 years, but 100% we should take that seriously.
That's our show.
Have a good weekend.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you Monday.
See you Monday.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, production manager Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Nika Geneva, and production coordinator McKenna Waters.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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