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Feb. 25, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show

50:06

Ep. 708 - Beyond Okay To Be Gay

A new Gallup poll shows a huge spike in LGBT identity, Romney makes a shocking prediction about 2024, and a Biden HHS official supports puberty blockers for kids. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	The data are in.
	The science is settled.
	America is getting super duper gay.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is the Michael Knowles Show.
	Welcome back to the show.
	My favorite comment from yesterday is from Matt, who says that for breakfast, Joe Biden loves muffins because muffins spelled backwards is sniff them.
	Got him.
	That is true.
	Joe Biden does love smelling people's hair.
	There is a Gallup poll out that shows, you know, what great respect I have for science and data.
	A Gallup poll comes out and shows that America is getting Extremely gay.
	Specifically, that's not specific enough.
	America is identifying much more as LGBT. And you know, this is a little complicated because the L and the G presuppose that there are biological sexes and, and, you know, men are men and women are women and gay guys are men who are attracted to men and lesbians are women who are attracted to women.
	But then the T comes in and confounds all of that because the T presupposes that there's not really any such thing as men or women and women can become men and men can become women and you're not really born this way.
	You know, everything's kind of fluid and changing all the time.
	So it's very, very confused, but the number of Americans who identify with any of those letters increasing pretty dramatically.
	The traditional percentage of Americans who identify this way, it's about 2%, maybe, maybe goes up to 3%.
	By 2017, that number rose to 4.5%, so it rose pretty significantly.
	And then in just the last four years, that number's risen again very significantly to 5.6%, so it's getting quicker and quicker.
	But the more curious number is when you drill down into the generations, because for Americans born before 1965, the number of LGBT identifying Americans is around 2%, a little bit less than 2%.
	When you get to millennials, that number jumps to about 9.1%.
	That is pretty, pretty high.
	Then when you get to Gen Z, that number jumps extremely high.
	That jumps to 15.9% of Americans.
	I have to believe that there is some biological basis for sexual desire.
	You know, there's this kind of debate.
	Are you born this way?
	Or does culture do it?
	You know, I don't think that you just sort of freely choose your sexual desires.
	So, I don't think, for instance, that Liberace was ever going to end up married to a woman.
	That just does not seem very likely to me.
	However...
	I don't think that 16% of Zoomers just so happen to be born this way, right?
	With all these sort of ever-expanding alphabet identities.
	If the numbers were increasing that dramatically, I would have to assume there's something in the water.
	If it was purely a biological thing, 100%, and the numbers were increasing that way, Alex Jones would have to be right.
	They're turning the frickin' Zoomers gay.
	I guess more T or G or B. It kind of gets very complicated, which is kind of my point.
	I think human sexuality is just a very complicated thing, and there are all these different factors in here.
	But surely, surely, Politics and culture plays some role in this as well.
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	I did a book club episode not that long ago with Spencer Clavin, and we were discussing Plato's Symposium, and And Plato's Symposium is very strange for modern readers to read because it's basically a big gay dinner party.
	And so a lot of modern conservatives or Christians will read this and say, wait a second, what's going on here?
	And there's a huge cultural factor at play in these sorts of behaviors.
	The reason this poll, I think, matters is because right now, if cultural and political factors have some role here, the cultural and political factors are all pushing in one direction, namely away from the sort of traditional understanding of these sexual questions toward a much namely away from the sort of traditional understanding of these sexual questions toward For instance, we talked about my friend Ryan T. Anderson and his extremely hilariously titled book, When Harry Became Sally.
	Now that's kicked off of Amazon.
	Amazon used to remove products that were politically incorrect, but they had this exception for books.
	They were not going to remove books.
	So you can buy books by Hitler on Amazon, You know, you can buy any sort of book that you find distasteful, and you can buy books that express mainstream conservative opinions like men cannot become women.
	They sort of under the radar got rid of this exception the other day.
	So now all of a sudden, Ryan Anderson's book, which is very academic work on the rise of transgenderism, is an ideology.
	That book is gone now.
	You're not allowed to say that.
	Amazon, private company.
	This is in the field of culture, but they've got a lot of political power, too.
	They are now limiting...
	The scope of reasonable and acceptable thought on these sexual questions and specifically on the gender question because I think most of the way the culture and politics are pushing in recent years is pushing in the direction of the T, in the direction of gender ideology.
	This is now being considered hate speech.
	Can you imagine what this means for other sorts of conservative books that in any way touch on these sorts of questions?
	My book coming up, Speechless.
	This book is going to be out in June, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
	No doubt it's going to fall afoul of the Amazon policy.
	If Ryan Anderson's book is going to fall afoul of it, certainly mine is too, and probably many others as well.
	Beyond just that kind of cultural business realm, the government is pushing in this direction.
	There is a bill before the California State Assembly, one of the most insane legislative bodies in the To make their children's section gender neutral.
	They want this to be in effect by 2023.
	This is called California Bill 2826 from Assemblyman Evan Lowe.
	You'll be shocked to find out that this person is a Democrat.
	This would apply to stores with 500 or more employees.
	So if you go into Target or something, right, and you say, oh, I want to buy a little...
	Little outfit for Johnny.
	What do you do?
	You go in, you go to the children's section, then you go to the boys' section.
	What this bill would say is, no, you're not allowed to have a boys' section.
	It's basically just going to make it a lot more time-consuming to pick out outfits and toys for your children because you're not going to be allowed to label anything.
	Why?
	Because the premise here is there's really no such thing as little boys and little girls.
	Little boys and little girls are not different.
	It underscores why the gender ideology is so at odds with kind of traditional homosexual activism.
	Because the homosexual premise is that there's a huge difference between boys and girls.
	And don't make a boy who's attracted to a boy go date a girl.
	The gender stuff gets rid of all of that.
	But this is being pushed at the governmental level.
	Then, in this kind of middle ground, at a school in Minnesota, it's not quite the government, but it sort of is the government, and it's public, and education is coercive.
	There's a middle school teacher.
	Who is teaching children who are 11 to 13 years old, who is basing at least one of his lesson plans around praising a transvestite prostitute.
	Now that we have Zoom school, now that people aren't really going into classrooms, you can watch some of these lessons.
	Take a listen to Mr.
	Perucco's Person of the Day.
	So I apologize for the very long wait for our suggester, but Perukin's person of the day is...
	Marsha P. Johnson.
	So if you don't know much about Marsha P. Johnson, they were known as a fierce advocate for gay rights and as an AIDS activist and a self-identified drag queen.
	In addition to all of their advocacy, Marsha was also well known for their presence at the Stonewall Uprising and the subsequent demonstrations throughout Greenwich Village that protested the police raids that had been taking place at local gay gathering places.
	Johnson's work paved the way for a louder and more prominent voice in the injustices that were being done in and to the gay community.
	The interesting part here is that Johnson himself was actually discriminated against by the community for being a drag queen.
	In 1973, the committee in charge of a pride parade said that they were not going to allow Drake Weeds to add the march because they felt that they were giving the community a bad name.
	That's actually a very telling aspect.
	I mean, first of all, this lesson plan is obviously not suitable for 11 year olds.
	You should not, you don't be paying tax money and sending your kids to schools so that your 11 year old can hear hagiographies of transvestite prostitutes.
	That's crazy.
	But what he says there at the end is he says, you know, actually the gay community in the seventies didn't, didn't really like this guy because they thought it was, it was like kind of just too weird.
	It was, It was too out there for the kind of activism they were doing.
	And you see this same kind of issue today.
	I mean, all of us have gay friends, no gay people.
	And I have yet to encounter one of them who say, yeah, this, this whole transgender movement where you're forcing kids to learn this crazy ideology and question their sex and sometimes go on puberty blockers.
	That's great.
	Oh yeah, man.
	I love that.
	That's terrific.
	No, of course.
	And that there was that tension going back to the seventies, but right now the left, the mainstream left schools, corporations, the government is pushing this kind of ideology on children.
	And it actually goes up all the way to the federal level, Even moderate Joe Biden, in this return-to-normalcy sort of administration, is appointing people to very high-level positions in the Department of Health and Human Services who do not just embrace this gender ideology themselves,
	do not just, you know, Take this premise, and by the way, when you're in a position of power and you're embracing these kinds of premises, it is inevitable, at least in this day and age, that you're going to force those premises onto your work and onto society.
	But there are people in the administration who are supporting this ideology for children, puberty blockers for children.
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	A very prominent appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services for Joe Biden is a fellow by the name of Dr.
	Rachel Levine.
	Dr.
	Rachel Levine is named Rachel because he identifies as a woman.
	A man who believes himself to be a woman is in a leadership role at the Department of Health and Human Services.
	Just going to leave that there.
	I don't want to speak that broadly today.
	I want to get into a very specific aspect of what Assistant Secretary of HHS, Rachel Levine, believes.
	Rachel Levine does not just want to force gender ideology on our national self-understanding.
	Rachel Levine also supports puberty blockers for children.
	We're fundamentally screwing with children's biochemistry because Johnny decides to pick up a Barbie doll or Jane decides to play with a toy truck.
	In January of 2020, so not that long ago, Rachel Levine tweeted out, quote, new studies found that transgender youth with access to a puberty blocker have a decline in chances of suicide, plus mental health problems now and in the future.
	By the way, these studies are few and far between, and their methodologies are very questionable, so one ought to be cautious with these sorts of new Studies that just conveniently happen to back up people's deeply held political views.
	This study is important because it's the first to show this specific association.
	There you have it.
	It's the first.
	Obviously, you've got to look into this more deeply, but the argument here is people who suffer from gender confusion and sexual confusion are depressed and anxious, and in the case of transgenderism, can be suicidal.
	And therefore, What we need to do as a society is embrace ideas, even if those ideas are manifestly false, like the idea that men can become women, in order to reduce this rate of suicidality.
	What's so important is we need to push this on kids.
	We talked yesterday about how the reason that the left focuses on education is because education shapes the way we view the world.
	And when we're young, we are much more susceptible to things.
	That's why we have a rating system for movies and TV shows.
	It's because if an adult is exposed to certain material, it's going to be much less influential on their thought one way or the other than if a little kid is exposed to certain material.
	It's why we have rules around, or we used to have rules around pornography for children that are different than for adults.
	If you wanted to go buy a Playboy down the street, you'd have to show an ID, right?
	Kids don't get to do that, but adults, because you're a little more formed, the idea is, theoretically, you can handle it.
	This is the argument behind age of consent laws.
	The reason that it's creepy when an old guy dates a young teenager is because the young teenager or younger, they're not really free to consent.
	Because the idea here is that through education, specifically through liberal education, right, education to make sense of your liberty, you tame your base passions, you tame your appetites, you develop your higher faculties, you develop your will, and then you can exercise your freedom.
	Right now, the left, in pursuit of gender ideology, and really they're just using gender ideology as a way to get more power, is throwing age of consent laws out the window.
	If it suits their ideology, they're willing to pump kids full of a bunch of chemicals and stop them from going through puberty.
	What happened to age of consent?
	It's a really bizarre, ironic phenomenon, too, because we talked about the Marilyn Manson sex scandal a few weeks ago, how this actress Evan Rachel Wood is accusing Marilyn Manson of abuse.
	And what's interesting about the story is that Evan Rachel Wood consented to I think she was engaged to Marilyn Manson for a long time.
	She consented to all the weird, depraved sexual acts that he was performing on her, I think, maybe with some exception, but it seems as though consent was a big part of this.
	And yet, what she says is, I couldn't really give consent.
	Even though I know I consented, you know, we were in this relationship, but I wasn't really giving consent because he groomed me when I was 18 years old and he was older.
	He manipulated me.
	He brainwashed me.
	I wasn't really in control of my liberty.
	I couldn't really make a free choice.
	So at the same time that the left is questioning the ability of certain adults to give consent, They are now embracing the ability of three-year-olds to give consent, or ten-year-olds to give consent, to stop going through puberty, make life-altering decisions.
	That doesn't make any sense.
	Except in the raw pursuit of power.
	What's funny is the kind of Evan Rachel Wood and Marilyn Manson of it all gets back to a much more conservative understanding of liberty.
	Which is that liberty isn't the freedom to do whatever you want, pursue whatever desire you have.
	That true liberty is the right to do what you ought to do.
	That's what Lord Acton thought.
	That's what our founding fathers thought.
	That's what old uncle Aristotle thought.
	That's what Christ teaches in the gospels.
	But somehow we've just completely lost our minds on this sort of thing.
	So you've got the culture pushing in one direction.
	And the reason that the left focuses on sex is because sex is very important.
	The left often accuses the right of being obsessed with sex and more broadly speaking the culture wars.
	But you'll notice in all of these sort of sexual specifically but cultural more broadly debates, it's never the right that is aggressing.
	It's always the left that's pushing this crazy stuff.
	So what the left does is they go in and they say, hey, we're going to pump your kids full of puberty blockers because we think that boys can become girls.
	And then conservatives will say, whoa, man, that's weird.
	No, don't do that.
	And they'll say, why are you so obsessed with sex?
	Stop.
	Come on, just stop obsessing about that.
	It's totally normal.
	Don't be weird.
	We're just going to go pump your kids full of puberty blockers.
	But don't be so obsessive and weird about that.
	We say, I think you're the one that's pushing a cultural agenda.
	And you see this clearly in the statistics here.
	I'm sort of half joking when I say America is getting super duper gay.
	What I actually suspect is, That maybe for some people who...
	Some people probably, you know, they know their sexual desires from pretty young age and these things have maybe more of a biological basis.
	For some people, it's more of a margin call.
	And, you know, maybe they're confused and they have lots of different desires.
	Human sexuality is complicated.
	And then for some people, I suspect they're just identifying this way because there is social cachet to it.
	In the same way...
	That our culture now discourages people from being white, right?
	You have HR trainings in corporate America that say, be less white.
	So what do you get?
	You get white people pretending to be black.
	You get people like Rachel Dolezal.
	You get people like that NYU professor.
	You get people, all sorts of people, who are pretending to be black.
	Different races.
	It seems like these stories crop up every couple of months.
	In the same way, I suspect you're getting people who have basically ordinary sexual desires who are now saying, no, I'm other.
	I'm trans.
	I'm gender non-conforming.
	I'm a homosexual.
	That's a new one.
	That's where you don't...
	I think it stands for postmodern, and it means you just don't want people to know your sexual views.
	So it means, like, you're a straight guy, but you want to sound, like, really cool.
	There's one I read called Nutoit.
	This is in the list of the hundred genders.
	Nutroi, I believe, is when you are sexually confused but also French.
	So you just become nutroi.
	Moi je suis nutroi.
	Je ne sais pas.
	You get people who are identifying that way because it carries social currency and the way that being able to claim...
	Membership in any aggrieved minority confers social currency today.
	So, too, that can be true in the realm of race, that can be true in the realm of sex, and that's obviously true in the realm of sexual desire as well.
	So, as you've got the culture all pushing in this direction, this does have real-world consequences.
	There's real-world consequences in, for instance, the discouragement of the forming of families.
	And when I say family, I don't mean in the sense that, you know, we can all have different kinds of families.
	I mean specifically families that will have children.
	That is declining a lot.
	I think some sort of squishy conservatives were celebrating a story that came out a while ago that divorce rates are hitting all-time lows.
	Well, that's great, but you got to read the second part of the story, which is that marriage rates are hitting all-time lows, too.
	And what happens when people don't get married?
	Birth rates are hitting lower and lower numbers.
	The United States right now is a dying country in the sense that we are not replacing ourselves.
	Our birth rate is below replacement.
	Is it possible that cultural and political factors have a role in this as well?
	Is it possible that on the cultural front, this idea that you are discouraged from forming a family, discouraged from forming sort of the traditional nuclear model, does that play a role in it?
	Does the economic front play a role in it?
	The idea that you're encouraged to just delay having kids, delay getting married, pursue your career, work, work, work.
	Everyone in the household needs to go work.
	I guess I'm sounding a little left-wing here because this is in a way a critique of modern capitalism.
	But I suspect that too is discouraging families and specifically discouraging people from having babies.
	And now you've got some Republicans...
	Some very conservative populist Republicans and even some squishes like Mitt Romney pushing back and saying, wait a second, if our public policy is ordered toward not having kids and not having families, maybe we should just rework our public policy to encourage those sorts of things.
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	Also, definitely check out the Ben Shapiro show today where Ben will be dissecting the cancel culture war and the wars over canceling and over canceling cancel culture and over canceling the people who want to cancel cancel culture.
	Also, there's a ton of narratives going on right now.
	Very difficult to keep track of all of the latest controversies and non-troversies that the left decides to be offended by.
	So...
	Get ready for The Daily Wire's newest show, soon to be released, Debunked, where Ben exposes leftist fallacies in 15 minutes or less.
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	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	The collapse of families is a social problem and a political problem and an economic problem.
	The family is the bedrock political institution.
	If that collapses as it has collapsed, look at marriage rates, look at birth rates.
	That poses an existential, truly an existential threat to the country.
	A lot of our other hot, controversial political issues come from that because when you have a country that's below replacement, when you have a dying country, people who want to keep the economy going are going to encourage mass migration, which is what you're seeing.
	People are going to, obviously mass migration involves lots of questions of assimilation, what the character of the country is.
	Who Americans are?
	What does it mean?
	If these sort of native-born Americans don't want to have kids, then other people are going to come in.
	How do you assimilate those people?
	Lots and lots of questions.
	Mitt Romney.
	Can't believe I've got to say a nice thing about Mitt Romney, but I do.
	You know I try to play fair.
	I've said many tough things about Mitt Romney for at least a decade now, but he is seeing a problem.
	Romney and Tom Cotton are proposing a minimum wage plan.
	This follows after Mitt Romney proposed a plan of direct payments to families who have children.
	Now, I don't know that I love Romney's proposal on the direct payments to families, but I like the idea of it.
	I like the idea that our public policy is not just neutral.
	Our public policy for a long time has been discouraging family formation, has been discouraging people from having kids.
	And so now we shouldn't just throw our hands up in the air.
	We should try to fix that policy.
	We should try to govern, use the political power that people give us to try to turn that back a little bit more in the other direction.
	So Romney has that plan and he's also pushing this idea of a $10 minimum wage.
	Now, generally speaking, at least the more libertarian minded people among the conservative movement hate the idea of minimum wage and minimum wage is a dangerous thing because there are a lot of problems that can result from But I actually think this proposal from Romney and Cotton is a pretty good one, which is that right now the left is pushing for a $15 minimum wage.
	It's almost certainly going to happen.
	So how can conservatives mitigate this and also make it work for us?
	Well, $15.
	Maybe it's a little high.
	Maybe that's too radical a way to increase the minimum wage.
	So what if we did it a little more gradually, a little more conservatively?
	You brought it to $10 per hour.
	You also had a carve-out for the youth minimum wage.
	So the youth minimum wage would increase more gradually, $4.25 an hour to $6 per hour.
	So you're not having young people totally booted out of the labor market.
	If everyone's going to get $15 an hour, you're going to go for the person who is more qualified, who's older, who has more experience.
	This would also have some carve-outs for businesses with fewer than 20 employees.
	But then here's the key.
	The legislation would require e-verify.
	So Democrats are pushing this $15 minimum wage.
	Republicans are saying, gosh, there's no way we're going to totally avoid this, but what if we kind of make the minimum wage part of it work a little more for us and then use this minimum wage issue to get e-verify?
	And e-verify is a way to discourage employers from using illegal foreign labor.
	That would be very good for families.
	That would be very good for American workers.
	One of the reasons...
	There are economic pressures that have discouraged people from family formation and from having kids.
	Namely, you used to be able to support a family on the wages of one American worker.
	The other spouse would stay home.
	Now...
	That's really very difficult, and part of that is because a lot of, especially lower-wage workers, are competing with this flood of cheap foreign labor.
	This is something that conservatives have been talking about a long time, but even old-school leftists like Bernie Sanders have been talking about.
	He's been saying, you know, unlimited immigration is really good for zillionaires who want to pay low wages, but it's really bad for the American worker.
	The people pushing it, it's this weird kind of dynamic of left-wingers in corporate America and even the sort of libertarian right-wingers like the Koch brothers, for instance, famously very in favor of much more immigration.
	So I think this is a decent enough plan.
	I like the big win of E-Verify.
	I also can't believe I have to say another nice thing about Mitt Romney today.
	There's a lot of debate over the future of the Republican Party and Trump's role in the Republican Party.
	You've got people like Liz Cheney, who's in-house leadership, who hates Trump.
	We'll get to her in a second.
	Romney also obviously hates Trump.
	He was a true never-Trumper.
	He didn't vote for Trump either time.
	He doesn't like the guy at all.
	But Romney was asked about 2024.
	Hey, you know, Mitt, do you have any thoughts about 2024?
	Do you think Trump will run?
	And Romney, calling it like he sees it, he says, yeah, if Trump does run, he's going to win in a landslide.
	Will President Trump continue to play a role in my party?
	I'm sure he will.
	He has by far the largest voice and a big impact in my party.
	I don't know about his family members, whether they intend to do that, but I expect he will continue playing a role.
	I don't know if he'll run in 2024 or not, but if he does, I'm pretty sure he will win the nomination.
	You think he would win the nomination?
	Oh, I think he'd win the nomination if he runs.
	I mean, a lot can happen between now and 2024.
	And I'm not great at predicting.
	I subscribe to Yogi Berra's philosophy in that regard.
	He said, I don't like predicting, particularly if the future is involved.
	So I don't really know what will happen there.
	But I look at the polls, and the polls show that among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President Trump in there, among Republicans, he wins in a landslide.
	Wins in a landslide.
	So what Mitt Romney is saying here, and he actually, he goes on to say this pretty explicitly.
	What he's saying here is Trump is the leader of the Republican Party.
	Because Mitt then goes on later in the interview and he says, you know, look, I represent a very small portion of the Republican Party.
	And Trump represents the Republican Party.
	That's why he would win the nomination in a landslide.
	So Romney, it's actually a very good interview because he also touches on part of the Trump phenomenon, which is this idea of populism.
	And few people would accuse Mitt Romney of being a populist.
	Except if you look at some of the policies proposing these days, maybe there's an argument that you could be made.
	But Mitt Romney makes a simple point.
	It's a plain truth, a self-evident truth, that populism is popular.
	Populism is successful because it's popular, which is part of its name.
	And populism hasn't disappeared where it tends to get installed, whether Italy or Argentina or Peru.
	And so there's a populist movement on the right in our country and on the left.
	And those movements, I don't believe, are going to be going away anytime soon, although I think over time that policies that endure and that really help the American family will be more successful.
	So I remain, if you will, a more traditional conservative than some of the populist rhetoric within my party.
	Ah, Mitt Romney is such a tragic figure.
	Mitt Romney, it's too bad, because he's saying a lot of smart things in here, and he's actually doing a lot of smart things right now, but he just doesn't quite get it.
	I don't know.
	I think for a lot of people, Trump sort of broke them, and I think he doesn't, he actually doesn't understand what is meant by populism and his role in all of that.
	I sort of think it's just because Romney's been running for president for decades at this point.
	It's kind of skewed his perception.
	You remember when Romney was running for the Senate against Ted Kennedy.
	He basically ran away from the legacy of Reagan.
	He ran away from being called a conservative.
	He said, I wasn't a conservative during the time of Reagan-Bush.
	I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush.
	I'm not that conservative.
	I think he was sort of pro-abortion when he ran for Senate.
	And then he pretends when he runs for president, he says, I'm severely conservative.
	And now he says, I'm a traditional conservative.
	Well, all these terms are kind of useless.
	I want to bring them all down to earth.
	What Romney is saying on his, by intimating that we should have a pro-family sort of policy, that's a populist idea.
	Whatever populism you want to say is motivating Trump, A lot of it has to do with overthrowing the old This ossified conservative political order of the last 20 years and saying, hey, wait a minute.
	Why are we just serving these zillionaires who hate our guts?
	Why are we shilling for hedge fund managers in Wall Street, the majority of whom don't like us at all?
	Why are we supporting trade deals that are bad for the American worker?
	Why are we, the kind of blue collar base of the Republican Party, doing these sorts of things that are really killing us and breaking up our families and breaking up our society and breaking up our American way of life?
	Let's not do that.
	Let's break these old sort of silly ideological maxims that I don't think made very much sense even when they were more popular.
	And let's focus on the family, the worker, the nation, American sovereignty, getting out of this sort of globalist regime that is not really serving most Americans and certainly not conserving our way of life.
	Romney's kind of saying the same thing.
	Saying, yeah, we need a very active policy to support families.
	Yeah, we should maybe raise the minimum wage, but only in a way that will curb immigration.
	These are very populist things.
	If any other politician were proposing what Romney is proposing right now, we would say, oh yeah, this is someone part of the MAGA movement, you know, part of the Trump movement.
	But because it's Romney, and because Romney is often very distasteful in the way he presents things, we don't like it very much.
	But I wish Romney would embrace his inner populist.
	I think he actually would be much more successful in some of the wisest stuff he's done in his whole career.
	All right, I've said too many nice things about generally squishy Republicans, so I've got to get back to knocking the squishes.
	This debate that Romney's talking about, where he says, you know, yeah, I like these kind of populist ideas, but I hate Trump.
	I would never vote for him.
	The question is, what is Trump's role in the future of the Republican Party?
	And you saw it split almost perfectly yesterday on C-SPAN, where you had the Republican minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, answered a question about Trump.
	Trump's role in the party in a pro-Trump way.
	And then Liz Cheney, this lady who is sort of in leadership, you know, it's a minor leadership role, but she is.
	She totally smacks Trump down.
	Do you believe President Trump should be speaking, or former President Trump should be speaking at CPAP this weekend?
	Yes, he should.
	Congressman Cheney?
	Yes.
	That's up to CPAC. I've been clear of my views about President Trump and the extent to which following January 6th, I don't believe that he should be playing a role in the future of the party or the country.
	On that high note?
	Kevin McCarthy, pretty funny here.
	And what's amazing is after, you can see the cringe sort of creeping on him as Liz Cheney answers.
	She goes, yeah, I hate Trump.
	He shouldn't have any role in the party, any role in the country.
	I'm Liz Cheney and I approve this message.
	And McCarthy is just thinking, ugh.
	And then once she finishes and he makes his little joke, they walk in opposite directions.
	McCarthy goes one way, Cheney goes the other.
	My question listening to this is, Why do Republicans tolerate this woman?
	Why on earth is Liz Cheney in leadership?
	Well, there's a practical reason.
	She's in leadership.
	There was a vote on her leadership.
	She's in leadership because they made it a secret ballot.
	If this had been a public ballot, she would not be in leadership because everybody knows that the Republican base, the Republican voters, do not think this woman represents them because this woman doesn't represent them.
	Even Mitt Romney's willing to admit that.
	He says, yeah, I represent a small portion of the Republican Party, and Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, is effectively what he's saying.
	So I'm not saying kick Liz Cheney out of the House, though probably she should be primaried and probably she would lose.
	I'm not saying kick Mitt Romney out of the Senate.
	I'm actually kind of more on Mitt's side here, where Mitt's saying, yeah, I represent the small portion, but Trump's the leader.
	Okay, if Trump is the guy who represents the Republican Party, why on earth...
	Is Liz Cheney in the leadership?
	What is the point of it?
	I'm saying, yeah, fine to disagree, big tent party.
	I'm cool with that.
	I really have no problem with that.
	But in leadership, this woman does not represent the party.
	Now, shockingly, I've got to get back to some other never-Trumpers and kind of squishy Republicans saying some good things.
	Never say...
	On this show that I am unfair or I'm only carrying water for certain politicians or others.
	I'm willing to compliment the kind of never-Trumpers and the squishes when they do and say good things.
	Because I actually don't want to cast them into outer darkness all the time.
	Sometimes I do.
	I actually want to bring them over to our way of thinking.
	If Mitt Romney would just...
	Actually listen to the very things that he is saying and get over his deep-seated hatred of Donald Trump, who's a polarizing figure we all grant.
	And if Mitt Romney could come on over more to the conservative side of things, I think that would be great.
	He's obviously an intelligent guy.
	He's an articulate guy.
	He's He's a good-looking guy, right?
	Just as a retail politics matter, he looks good.
	If he could come over to our way of thinking, great, I welcome him in.
	This is true of a number of the other kind of squishier Republicans who have really gone squishy in the age of Trump.
	Guys like Ben Sasse, for instance.
	Who I thought yesterday had a terrific performance grilling Joe Biden's nominee for the Department of Health and Human Services.
	Not the fellow who thinks he's a lady, the assistant secretary, but the actual nominee for secretary of HHS, Becerra.
	Ben Sasse, who has invoked theire of many conservatives in recent weeks and months, because he was a never-Trumper and he often attacks members of his own party and he was censured by his own state Republican party.
	Sasse had a great performance yesterday going after Xavier Becerra.
	Becerra was the former attorney general of California and a real, real radical.
	The Becerra went after nuns, just like the Obama-Biden administration did.
	Becerra went after nuns because he wanted to force them to pay for abortion drugs and contraceptives.
	So Sass grilled him on this point.
	I try to say to Senator Grassley, I understand that Americans have different, deeply held beliefs on this particular issue, and I absolutely respect that.
	By the way, I have never sued any nuns.
	I have taken on the federal government, but I've never sued any affiliation of nuns.
	Hold up.
	Point that there before we really get into what Sass says.
	It is technically true that Becerra never sued nuns.
	What he did was even crazier.
	He wanted to sue nuns.
	The federal government, under the Trump administration, would not let him sue nuns to try to force them to pay for abortion drugs and contraceptives.
	So Becerra sued the federal government so that he could get his right back to sue the nuns and try to force them to pay for abortion and contraceptives.
	Sass, totally not going to take his lame excuses.
	You know well, you're an incredibly smart man, you know well that what the federal government did was make sure that you couldn't target the nuns.
	So you sued the federal government because the federal government said the nuns didn't have to buy contraceptive insurance.
	You can put 17 layers of you were following the law to go after the federal government for administering the program or doing X or doing Y that made it difficult for California to administer the program.
	But it was just about nuns buying contraceptive coverage.
	Was there something else the federal government did that you were suing them for?
	Senator, the case was not again, that was not the name of the case.
	And what I will tell you is that Our actions were based on trying to follow the law.
	When the federal government took action, which we believe did not comport with the law, at that point we took action.
	And our action was based on the law.
	And so, as I've said, we may disagree on how we see this, and I respect the differences that we may have, but my action was to follow the law.
	No, it wasn't.
	Your action was to attack the law, to dispute the law in court because the federal government interpreted this federal law and you didn't like it because the government's interpretation said you couldn't sue the nuns.
	So stop.
	Please stop.
	This ridiculous posturing, this ridiculous proceduralist posturing and get to the heart of it.
	You wanted to sue the nuns to make them pay for abortions and contraceptives and the federal government didn't want you to do it, so you sued them.
	Speaking of trying to grow the American family, speaking of trying to reverse this course of national death and decline, one good way to reduce that is to stop killing our babies.
	And to encourage a culture of life rather than a culture of death.
	But Becerra is a good politician.
	You know, he's a shrewd guy, so he knows how to portray this where if you didn't know the facts of this case and you just watched this exchange, maybe you'd say, oh, they both got good points in.
	But sass, sass, gotta give it to him.
	He won't let up.
	What about the law, as the federal government's conscience exceptions applied in the case where you sued the federal government, what about the law applied to anybody except the nuns and other similarly situated religious institutions?
	You were targeting religious liberty.
	What about the law?
	I know we're talking about the law.
	What about the law, though?
	What were you trying to do with the law, pal?
	And this is the big issue.
	Right now, under moderate Joe Biden's administration, you've got the leader of HHS pushing politics toward encouraging a culture of contraception and abortion.
	This is the issue.
	You've got this world in which the The government, right, I think the conservatives for too long have kind of embraced this libertarian idea that there's the government and the government can never do anything.
	Anything the government does is bad and, you know, we can't ever use political power that people give us.
	And this has given the left the opportunity to completely transform the culture.
	But politics and culture, which is a little blurry line in between those things, they can encourage things one way or the other.
	And by the way, when they say one thing, they exclude other things.
	So getting back to what we were talking to at the top of the show, if you have a culture, and a culture backed up by a political regime, that says that it is simply a fact that men can become women, women can become men, and it's bigoted to say otherwise, and you drill this into kids' heads from kindergarten onwards...
	And then you use the law to say we should pump kids full of puberty blockers if, you know, Jane likes to play football at Thanksgiving or something.
	And we should fundamentally change their biochemistry.
	What you're doing is you're saying this is the way the world works.
	And all of those incentives are going to be compounded.
	You know, conservatives used to understand how incentives work.
	You know, when you incentivize something, you tend to get more of it.
	When you disincentivize something, you tend to get less of it.
	For a long time, the left was focused entirely on transforming the culture, and the right was focused on getting more tax cuts.
	And that was it.
	And the right completely gave up on these cultural sorts of issues.
	And the left aggressed and aggressed and aggressed on issues of race, on issues of sex.
	We're seeing that all today.
	The result of this has been a politics of division, a politics of confusion, a politics of hollowing out our institutions and our tradition.
	And we got some tax cuts.
	Look, I like tax cuts.
	I love tax cuts, but there's much more.
	And if conservatives, whatever the conservative movement, the Republican party is going to be in the future, If it does not focus on preserving the American family, then up from that, the American local polity, local towns, thriving communities, and up from that, the American sense of nationhood, the American sense of our way of life.
	If we don't preserve that, We are doing absolutely nothing at all.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	More tomorrow.
	More tomorrow.
	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.
	Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Democrats worry about how to cancel Republicans, while Republicans worry about being canceled.
	And Amazon engages in digital book burning.
	We'll get to that on today's show.

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