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Feb. 26, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
50:02
Ep. 709 - War On Nature

Biden bombs Syria, Democrats defend genital mutilation, and Mr. Potato Head questions his identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The U.S. is bombing Syria again.
The United States struck two targets in Syria.
The Pentagon is saying that this was a decision made not primarily by the military, but all the way to the top by the civilian authorities.
Some people are a little upset about this, but I think it's very important to point out, I have this on very good information, that the person who dropped the bombs was a biracial, gender-confused millennial.
So this was a very, very woke...
And progressive bombing of Syria.
Of course, bombing Syria is about as normal as it gets for U.S. foreign policy.
So in a way, I think we could all say nature is healing.
We are returning to normal as the bombs drop.
I'm Michael Knowles.
It's the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Frankincensed, who says, As I've gotten older, I've become less and less gay.
As a matter of fact, except for a few brief years, since 2009, I haven't been laughing much at all.
That's true.
You know, I remain pretty and witty and gay myself, despite all of the difficult news out there.
But it's true.
Words, words really do change their meaning over time.
I guess this is actually the primary method by which the left acts.
This is the topic of my book coming out, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
And we're sure seeing a lot of it today.
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We are bombing the Middle East again.
It is.
It's, you know, by one standard, this is pretty abnormal, you know, but by the sort of recent American presidency, Trump accepted.
He was a bit of an aberration by using Biden now bombing on his 36th day in office, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, you know, bombing the Middle East, not so out of the ordinary.
I want to talk not just about this sort of nature of American foreign policy.
I want to talk about the war on nature that is going on right now, on human nature, through this gender theory.
If anyone thinks that we focus too much on gender theory in this show, I just want to say I would much rather not waste time talking about how men are men and women are women.
The reason we have to do that as conservatives is because this has become issue number one for the left.
They are putting as much of their resources as they possibly can behind convincing and coercing every American into believing that men can be women and women can be men.
And this has really ugly effects, not just on our self-understanding, but on a very practical and technical level.
This leads to the genital mutilation of children.
This is a harsh reality.
The left is denying this entirely, but Rand Paul yesterday, Rand Paul, who I think had his cojones surgically transitioned into steel, decided to bring this up with Rachel Levine, the, I almost said Obama, the Biden appointee to a I almost said Obama, the Biden appointee to a senior position in HHS, who is a man who believes that he's a woman.
I A man who believes he's a woman is now in a leadership role at the Department of Health and Human Services.
And he believes that we ought to, in some cases, Mutilate the genitals of children.
So Rand Paul was not going to go down without a fight.
Genital mutilation has been nearly universally condemned.
Genital mutilation has been condemned by the WHO, the United Nations Children's Fund, the United Nations Population Fund.
According to the WHO, genital mutilation is recognized internationally as a violation of human rights.
Genital mutilation is considered particularly egregious because, as the WHO notes, it is nearly always carried out on minors and is a violation of the rights of children.
Most genital mutilation is not typically performed by force, but as WHO notes, that by social convention, social norm, the social pressure to conform, to do what others do and have been doing, as well as the need to be accepted socially and the fear of being rejected by the community.
American culture is now normalizing the idea that minors can be given hormones to prevent their biological development of their secondary sexual characteristics.
I am so pleased that Rand Paul is bringing this up.
Rand Paul absolutely crushing it.
I've said many, many very nice things about Rand Paul over the past several months because he's really standing up on this issue.
This is genital mutilation.
When you go in and you start tinkering with children's sexuality because of these faddish and ridiculous theories, you are committing...
A particularly egregious form of genital mutilation.
Some guy on Twitter who first discovered this little clip from Rand Paul and popularized it on the internet, he said, oh my goodness gracious, he's a Daily Beast reporter.
He says, Rand Paul is likening gender transition surgery to genital mutilation.
It is literally genital mutilation.
What you do is you mutilate the genitals.
Now, I'd like to anticipate the arguments, and I don't even need to anticipate them because I did see some people commenting on this yesterday from the left.
It's difficult to define what mutilation is in our society because in order to understand what mutilation is, you have to understand what things are for.
If I get heart surgery, let's say there's something wrong with my ticker and I get heart surgery, they're going to go in with some scalpels and push things around, but that's not mutilation.
If I need my appendix out or something, that's not mutilation.
So mutilation is specifically something that causes injury, causes damage, makes something less perfect.
Well, what is perfection?
It's when a thing is doing what it is meant to do.
So if I need heart surgery and they go in and they put a stent in my heart or something, that's not mutilation.
That's making my heart more perfect.
It's making my heart do what it is supposed to do.
If I go in and turn little Johnny's, you know, manhood into little Jane's simulacrum of man, of womanhood, that is almost the textbook definition of mutilation.
You are taking a perfectly functioning organ.
You are then destroying it.
You are preventing it from doing what it is supposed to do and turning it into something else.
But in our culture, because we basically throw our hands up in the air and say, well, we don't know what's good or bad and we don't know what things are for and we, who am I to judge, you know, what, what that's for.
We can't really make that argument quite as well.
It is knowable through our faculties of reason from nature.
We know what the eye is for.
The eye is for seeing.
The eyes in their perfection can see.
When the eyes can't see, there's an imperfection that's called blindness.
And we don't think that blindness and sightedness are equally perfect.
We recognize that one of those things is a disability because the I is meant for a purpose.
So I actually do want to grant the left's premise here a little bit.
I don't want to grant the premise.
I want to point out that the left...
Genuinely can't understand what we mean when we say that if you turn a well-functioning organ into some, I don't know what, to look like another kind of organ, that is a mutilation.
And the nominee here from Joe Biden doesn't seem to understand that.
Dr.
Levine, you have supported both allowing minors to be given hormone blockers to prevent them from going through puberty, as well as surgical destruction of a minor's genitalia.
Like surgical mutilation, hormonal interruption of puberty can permanently alter and prevent secondary sexual characteristics.
The American College of Pediatricians reports that 80-95% of prepubertal children with gender dysphoria will experience resolution by late adolescence if not exposed to medical intervention and social affirmation.
Dr.
Levine, do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing one's sex?
Well, Senator, thank you for your interest in this question.
Transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field.
Stop it.
Stop it right there.
You've already given the wrong answer.
If the question is, do you really support destroying the sexual organs of children and mutilating them?
If your answer is not, no, no, what are you talking about?
If your answer is, well, you know, it's complicated, you've already given the wrong answer.
And unfortunately, this is not just at HHS. This is now being enshrined into law.
This ideology has been marching on and on and on, gradually, then suddenly.
You saw it affirmed by the Supreme Court.
Thank you again, Neil Gorsuch.
It was affirmed by the Supreme Court in the Bostock decision, which effectively redefined legal protections for sex, you know, boys and girls.
As protections for sexual identity, meaning they destroy the protections for boys and girls, right?
Because if you have a protection for sexual identity, then you no longer have a protection for sex.
If the protection for sex means that girls get their own sports leagues, but the protection for sexual identity means that boys get to compete in those sports leagues, then you've just lost.
You've just lost the prior legal protection.
This comes with the House's passage of the Equality Act.
The Equality Act is one of these laws, there are a lot of laws like this, sort of like the Patriot Act, which they sound so unimpeachable that if you don't support the Patriot Act, you're not a patriot.
And if you don't support the Equality Act, you hate equality or something like that.
The Equality Act is the most radical legislation we have ever passed in this country.
It redefines these protections into law now.
It redefines these protections on sex for gender identity and sexual orientation.
This will practically, if it is voted on in the Senate, which hopefully it won't be, and if it's signed into law by Biden, this will practically Eradicate any distinction between men and women in the law.
Will it be actually put into effect?
I certainly hope not.
But this is as significant a cultural upheaval as we have ever seen.
This is Rachel Levine defending the genital mutilation of children at a committee hearing, or rather at a testimony, on a national legislative scale.
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This crazy gender theory has become somehow the defining issue of our time.
When the left says that transgender rights are the civil rights issue of our time, a lot of conservatives we roll our eyes, they're right in a certain sense.
I don't think that there's any real comparison between racial bigotry and the belief that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, but it has become a defining issue.
Which means we live in a very stupid time.
If this is the defining issue of our time, we live in a very stupid time.
Which means we have to get to the most important story of the day.
Mr.
Potato Head.
For a few hours yesterday, Mr.
Potato Head lost his sex.
We were told by Hasbro that Mr.
Potato Head would no longer be Mr.
Potato Head.
He would just be Potato Head.
So much for respecting people's preferred pronouns.
When we found out that Mr.
Potato Head was being canceled, I was scurrying to the Daily Wire legal department.
I was running to Jeremy the God King Boring's office.
I said, we have got to sign a three-picture deal.
We need to start working with Mr.
Potato Head now.
We need Mr.
Potato Head to come on the Sunday special and give his side of the story.
But then, a few hours later, after this controversy was raging, Hasbro came out and corrected the record.
Said, hold that tot.
Your main spud, Mr.
Potato Head, isn't going anywhere.
While it was announced today that the Potato Head brand name and logo are dropping the Mr., I am proud to confirm that Mr.
and Mrs.
Potato Head aren't going anywhere and will remain Mr.
and Mrs.
Potato Head.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief that the potatoes get to keep their secondary sexual characteristics.
What those are, I don't know, and I really don't want to know.
I suspect that the Mr.
Potato Head gender controversy was a marketing ploy.
There are only two options here.
Either Hasbro really wanted to castrate the potato, and then there was so much pushback that they decided they were going to let him keep that particular attachable appendage.
Or they realized that we live in a time that is so tense and so on edge and there are all these controversies and particularly around this issue of sex and gender and they were going to exploit that by pretending to give in to this gender ideology but then pulling back on it.
And the reason I think this is, when was the last time you were talking about Mr.
Potato Head?
I, for one, can't remember the last time I mentioned Mr.
Potato Head or even remember that Mr.
Potato Head exists.
And now we're thinking about it.
This matters because companies realize this is at the top of people's minds.
And the way you market is you go where people's minds are, you try to gin up controversy, and then you can sell your product.
The potatoes are not the only toy and product that is doing this.
Oreo cookies.
The marketing team behind Oreo cookies getting in on it as well.
Oreos tweeted out yesterday, quote, trans people exist.
My first reaction to Oreo's bold statement here was, you are a cookie.
Why am I listening to the philosophical declarations?
Why am I listening to the Gnostic dualist theories that Of a delicious sandwich cookie.
I don't know because we're living in a very, very stupid time where everything has to be politicized.
You know, this was, I hate, as you know, to keep plugging my book, but providentially my book happens to be about all this stuff that's going on like right this very minute.
And this was the plan of the people who pushed political correctness.
It was to politicize all of the terms, all of the things that Beginning with, in Karl Marx's words, the ruthless criticism of all that exists, which develops then into critical theory, which you see a lot on college campuses now.
We've heard a lot about critical race theory.
Into the feminists of the 1970s who said that the personal is the political.
Every intimate interaction between everything, your cookies, your coffee mugs, your sneakers, your relationship to your husband or wife, everything has to be open to public scrutiny now and politicized.
Including Oreos, including Mr.
Potato Head and Mrs.
Potato Head.
So now Oreo cookie, when you eat the Oreo cookie, you are making a political statement.
Speaking of black and white issues, how is that for a segue?
Barack Obama is pursuing this kind of divisive strategy, not on the sexual front, but on the racial front.
Obama is back.
He's as radical as ever.
He was asked about this question of reparations on his new absolutely insufferable podcast with Bruce Springsteen.
I think we should outlaw podcasts.
I know that I host a podcast.
It is my main job.
I don't care.
Springsteen and Obama, it's gone too far.
And I know we're for freedom and whatever.
I don't care.
I'll be an authoritarian.
We need to ban this.
This is too insufferable to be permitted in society.
Barack Obama on this podcast was discussing reparations for slavery, a radical and sort of ridiculous proposal by the Vantage of 2021.
Obama says that the reason we never got reparations, the politics of white resistance.
What I saw during my presidency was that the politics of white resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action,
all that Made the prospect of actually proposing any kind of coherent, meaningful reparations program struck me as politically not only a non-starter, but potentially counterproductive.
Because of those white people with their resistance and their resentment, we couldn't get Reparations.
Now, first of all, I love too that he lumps affirmative action in there.
As though it's somehow unnatural to resent having a disadvantage when you're applying to college or a job.
You know, yes, it's the politics of Asian resentment that they don't accept affirmative action at Harvard and Yale.
That they don't accept being disadvantaged by the admissions committee.
Because of all their very white Asian privilege or Asian white privilege.
I don't know.
I'm very confused.
But he's also just wrong on the facts here.
Black people do not support affirmative action or do not support reparations overwhelmingly either.
So according to a Reuters Ipsos poll from 2020, one in five Americans generally said that we should use taxpayer money to pay damages to descendants of enslaved people in America.
One in five people believe this.
Eighty percent of Republicans oppose reparations.
Two-thirds of Democrats are not supportive of reparations.
Ten percent of whites are supportive of reparations.
Only half of black people are supportive of reparations.
This is a very radical view and a proposal that is supported by a very small number of Americans.
And it doesn't break down cleanly on racial lines.
If what Barack Obama is saying is true, then you'd say basically no white people support reparations, which is essentially true.
But all the black people support reparations.
That's not true.
Only half of black people support reparations.
And the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose it because it's an incoherent policy.
He says, you know, in order for us to have a coherent policy, we would need all this white support.
There is no coherent policy.
Slavery was abolished 150 years ago.
You already, even at the time of emancipation, you would have had a little bit of trouble with...
But at least you could, you know, 40 acres and a mule, you could have done it.
But now, generation after generation after generation, many people descended from slaves.
Many of those same people descended from white people.
We've mentioned on this show before, the first officially declared slave owner in the American tradition was a black Angolan guy named Anthony Johnson.
That's kind of weird.
Do his descendants get reparations?
Do recent immigrants from Africa get reparations?
It would be very difficult.
How do you prove that sort of thing?
But the real distinction here is not a racial one, it's a radical one.
People who share Barack Obama's radical politics and people who do not.
Speaking of things that black Americans are not totally sold on, It would appear that many of them don't want to get the vaccine, which we will get to in just one second.
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There is an article in the FT Financial Times.
The fight to overcome vaccine hesitancy among African Americans.
A tide of misinformation and centuries of medical malpractice have led to wariness about the COVID-19 jab.
And the Financial Times goes on and writes a very sort of sympathetic article about this.
So, This issue of black people being a little bit skeptical of the vaccine in America, this is being treated as, well, you know, it's totally understandable.
Black people have endured a long experience of medical experts deceiving them and getting things wrong, and so therefore they're skeptical.
And this is true, and for black people it's true in specific ways.
It's also true for all the rest of us.
We've just gone through, just this past year, the experience of the most prominent medical expert in the world lying to us.
Anthony Fauci, remember?
So Anthony Fauci, at the very least, we can say he got things wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong again.
But...
I'm also pretty certain that he lied to us because you remember early on in the pandemic, what did Fauci say about that?
He said, there's no reason to wear a mask.
You don't need to wear a mask now.
It won't protect you from anything.
Stop buying the masks.
Don't wear them in public.
Then about five seconds later, he said, you have to wear the mask.
We said, well, hold on.
Why do you mean I have to wear the mask?
You just told me I shouldn't wear the mask.
What changed?
And his example was, I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly.
He said, well, you understand.
At the time when I said, don't wear a mask, they don't do anything, I wanted to save all the masks for the nurses.
I didn't think that you filthy peasants deserved any masks.
So what I did, you understand, is I lied to your face, and I told you not to do it, and then I gave all the masks over to the nurses, but then when I saw we had enough, I decided that I could tell you to get the masks.
So believe me, good old Dr.
Fauci.
That's what he said.
Slightly different words, but that was what he conveyed.
So yes, I think everybody in this country, regardless of their race, has had this experience of medical experts being wrong and in some cases being dishonest.
Add on top of that that we have a vaccine, very impressive, it was developed in six months.
That's pretty weird.
Vaccines take a very long time to build, and I'm not saying that the vaccine is terrible or awful or it's going to cause all these problems, though obviously people have had reactions to the second shot.
I'm not saying that I would never consider getting the vaccine.
I'm not saying that if I were 90 years old, I wouldn't seriously consider getting the vaccine.
But I am saying that skepticism is...
Understandable.
Frankly, it's warranted.
Aren't we always supposed to be skeptical of the scientific process?
I just wish that there weren't this double standard where when black people have that perfectly reasonable skepticism, they are treated as these totally reasonable, wonderful people, you know, following their best lights.
And when white people or anybody else does it, we're considered monsters and serial killers.
Speaking of support for things, it's a little bit of a weak transition.
Mitch McConnell was just asked about 2024.
Mitch McConnell, you know, he didn't like Trump.
Then he kind of worked with Trump.
Then he threw Trump under the bus, especially after the Capitol riot.
Now McConnell is being asked in 2024 if Trump is the nominee and Would you support him?
This comes as Liz Cheney, a kind of minor member of House leadership, says Trump should have no say in the future of the Republican Party.
No say in the future of the country.
McConnell asked, would you support Trump?
The guy doesn't hesitate.
There's a lot to happen between now and 24.
I've got at least four members that I think are planning on running for president, plus some governors and others.
There's no incumbent.
Should be a wide open race and fun for you all to cover.
If the president was the party's nominee, would you support him?
The nominee of the party?
Absolutely.
Would I support the nominee of the party?
Absolutely.
Of course, this is the right answer.
Romney probably would not support Trump if he were the nominee, because he is truly never Trump.
But even Romney said, I think it's very likely, that if Trump ran, he would win the nomination in a landslide.
And so this does Really call into question people like Liz Cheney who claim to be in leadership but all they seem to be doing is dividing the Republican Party.
This is something that we all do, particularly those of us who are in conservative media, who write articles or books or have podcasts or things like that.
We always focus on the differences, the distinctions between different types of conservatives.
And I think that's very important and it's how you transform the direction of the party and you try to fix it and make sure it's going the right way, not the wrong way.
But if you are an elected Republican, You need to be on the team.
I mean, you are on the team, and you really need to support the team.
And I think this is true of all of us, really, to a lesser degree.
Conservatives are really good at pointing out all the little minute differences that we all have, but we do need to come together at a certain point.
Otherwise, we're just not going to be able to win any elections or do anything, and it's all going to be just a bunch of freshman dorm room bowl sessions when we talk about all the grand plans we have while the left destroys the country.
The person who probably did this most successfully in American history was William F. Buckley Jr.
when he founded the post-war conservative movement.
And now it's very fashionable to attack Bill Buckley because I think people actually are attacking Buckleyism, sort of what his followers decades and decades later claim, rather than Buckley himself, who was actually quite conservative and a pretty serious guy, pretty strong spine in that fellow.
What Buckley was able to do was unite these disparate factions of the broader right.
Bring them together and actually win and actually get some things done.
Was his record of accomplishment, was it perfect?
Was it 100% we got everything we wanted?
No, but he did win his fight.
He did accomplish a lot in his time.
Now it's up to us.
And I just do think it would be helpful Even as we're parsing out our differences and figuring out where the party should go, if we could actually bring people together.
Because the left is playing for keeps.
You know, I know that we're supposed to say that the 2020 election was absolutely perfect.
There was nothing wrong with it.
There was no reason to question it whatsoever.
I'm not someone who has said that, but I know that's what we're told by the big tech experts.
Tyrants.
No way that we should question anything about, you know, the way the vote was conducted in Pennsylvania or how they violated the state constitution, actually.
That's pretty weird, but no, can't question them.
Stephen Crowder went out and uncovered Quite a bit of evidence of voter fraud.
Now, I want to be very careful with what I'm saying.
I'm not saying he uncovered evidence that the election was illegitimate.
I'm not saying he uncovered evidence that, you know, this was a total, Trump actually won.
I'm just saying he uncovered evidence of fraud and now people are trying to shut him up.
Now, what I want to focus on is something that I would swear under oath, penalty of perjury, what I'm about to present to you, because Dominion isn't needed.
I'm not saying that nothing nefarious happened with Dominion.
I just can't confirm it.
I can confirm to you that these people voted from it, who may or may not be real people, voted from addresses that do not exist.
So just because I don't address some issue relating to voter fraud doesn't mean that I don't believe there's foul play.
I do have to unfortunately hold ourselves to the standard of doing our due diligence and only confirming what we've seen with our own eyes.
By the way, let's contrast that with the left.
What does the New York Times have to say?
What does MSNBC have to say?
No evidence of voter fraud.
Well, really?
Have you looked through the voter listings?
Have you gone to these addresses?
There's no burden of proof on them.
I highly recommend you head on over, check out Crowder's episode on this.
It's excellent, as are all of his episodes, but this one in particular.
The liberal establishment is bearing down on us in a way that we haven't seen before.
They are reverting all the way back to the old sort of classical establishment foreign policy with that slight aberration kind of under Trump.
They're ramping things up, though.
They're ramping things up on the gender ideology.
They're ramping things up on the legislative front.
They're wrapping things up on the bureaucratic front.
And they are ramping things up on big tech.
Steven Crowder was kicked off of Twitter.
I think only briefly, but he was kicked off of Twitter for saying that.
They have so much power here.
We need to be unified if we are ever, ever going to try to push back on that.
Because this is an aggression, not just on some of our political traditions, but on nature itself.
You know, there's a whole lot of narratives around hot topic issues right now.
It's very difficult to keep track of all the newest controversies and non-troversies that the left decides to be offended by.
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We'll be right back with the mailbag.
All right, my favorite time of the week, the mailbag.
First question from Matt.
Future bureaucrat of the DeSantis administration, Knowles.
Wow, that's a title I haven't heard before.
Should conservatives start getting behind one candidate for 2024 now, such as Governor DeSantis?
If conservatives can unite, as you've talked about...
Wow, oh my God.
I've got to put a pause there.
I did not plan that.
I cannot believe how perfectly that first question came out of what we were just talking about.
Great stuff.
Absolutely providential.
Nature is but art unknown to thee.
Chance direction which thou canst not see.
Getting back to his question, should we unite as you've talked about so that we can be successful in 2022 and 2024?
Is there a benefit to waiting for another 16 candidates to run during election season as the GOP did in 2016 and Democrats did in 2020?
I think there is a benefit to having a bunch of candidates run in the primary.
I am a supporter of primaries.
And the reason for this is, well, look, we had as many candidates run or more candidates run than we ever have had in the Republican Party in 2016, and what happened?
They all bloodied each other up, and they really bloodied up Trump, and then Trump won in the general.
That process of bloodying everybody up actually seems to have helped.
It's a process the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb might call anti-fragility.
The more you beat people up, the stronger they get.
I think that's generally true of politicians.
The other reason here, I mean, you mentioned Ron DeSantis.
I think Ron DeSantis is really a terrific governor.
He's doing an excellent job.
And I think he would be a very interesting candidate in 2024.
But the thing about DeSantis is the thing about all sorts of politicians that we don't know much about.
We see their strengths when they jump onto the scene, but we don't necessarily know their weaknesses yet.
That's the point of a primary process.
So if Ron DeSantis does run, then we're going to start to see that.
I've compared Ron DeSantis right now to Chris Christie, and some people think that's an insult.
It's not an insult.
I'm comparing him not to Christie in 2016 or 2020, but Christie in 2012 when he was, I felt, a very formidable candidate.
He ended up not running.
And we sort of found out why he didn't run, because he had a lot of weaknesses, particularly around that time.
And they came out and...
I think changed our view of him.
I'm not saying there's anything like that for Ron DeSantis.
I'm just saying that you need a primary process because if you don't, if you just pick someone who looks really, really good, then you're going to get to the general election and you might be in store for a big surprise.
I also think there are at least two or so other candidates who could be very serious, very attractive contenders for 2024.
I won't necessarily get into the horse race yet.
It's so early.
There could be candidates that we haven't even heard about yet.
But I'm definitely pro-primary.
From Alexa.
Michael, my boyfriend and I love your show.
I'm so pleased to hear that.
Thank you.
You have excellent taste, both you and your boyfriend.
We're attorneys practicing in Missouri.
Last year, the Missouri Supreme Court added a continuing legal education requirement for attorneys to obtain at least one CLE credit hour by attending a cultural competency, diversity, inclusion, and implicit bias program.
I've attached a picture of one of the most woke slides I've ever seen.
These people are teaching attorneys that there should be two standards in criminal cases because the beyond a reasonable doubt standard is racist.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this BS. Thanks.
Yeah, this is absolutely insane, but it is what's happening all over the place.
I think the answer to this is going to be getting in the weeds here.
And what I mean by that is not just yelling about how dumb diversity training is or any of these sorts of things.
We're not just talking about how actually sort of bigoted these issues are.
You know, to say that beyond a reasonable doubt is racist.
To say the things as, for instance, the Smithsonian Institution has in other places, that objective reality is anti-black or something.
Hard work is a white supremacist term or whatever.
You know, those terms in and of themselves, or those ideas in and of themselves are quite bigoted, but instead of just yelling about that, we need to get in the fight.
I was talking to my friend Carol Swain yesterday, who lives here in Nashville, and Carol, terrific conservative voice and thinker, Carol is proposing her own kind of training called unity training, right?
We have diversity training.
She's proposing unity training.
I think this is a great idea.
And what it does is it doesn't just complain and criticize.
It gets in the weeds and say, okay, we're going to have to have some kind of stupid training in corporate America.
We're going to do the conservative one.
We're not going to do the insane radical leftist one.
And it's much harder, I think, for the left to fight that because the vast majority of people are not paying attention to this sort of thing.
And so if the left has advanced by being the loudest and the most forceful and just getting their ideas through because most people don't want to take the time to deal with them, then if the right comes in and says, okay, you've got to do some kind of training.
We're all accustomed to that now.
You've got diversity training.
We can do unity training.
If the right can do that, I think there are going to be a lot of conservative business leaders, people in government, people in various associations, who will opt for that so they get the sort of optics of doing the training, and they can check that box for most people, but they'll get the better substance.
I would get in there.
We were talking the other day on the backstage show.
Conservatives need to embrace lawfare.
Conservatives need to Go in and say some things are right and some things are wrong.
We need to get much more serious.
And the old throw your hands up, you know, we can't use the government at all.
We can't engage in politics.
That idea that we've had from like 2000 to 2020, got to get rid of that.
From Nick.
Hey Michael, big fan of the show.
However...
I'm also a big fan of Ron Paul.
Thanks so much.
I don't love marijuana.
I definitely had it a number of times in my wayward youth.
It was never my favorite.
I much prefer booze and tobacco to marijuana.
So I don't take a puritanical view of it.
But I think this is actually my issue here when it comes to To the kind of libertarian response on drugs.
Which is, I go with the libertarians on so many policies.
I agree with them on so many policies.
But then you get to something like drugs and it reveals that we're beginning with different preferences.
Which is, I think libertarians look at the drug issue from this very rationalist, very abstract perspective where they say...
You know, through all this kind of ideological musing, I have determined that I have a natural, unalienable right to smoke pot.
And if you infringe on my right to smoke pot, this is a grave injustice and we, you know, we're not a just society if we do that sort of thing.
My approach to marijuana is, is it good or bad?
Is it good or bad?
Now, some libertarians will then say, well, the moment that you take into account a conception of the good or the bad in society, you've gone off the rails because, you know, the left is going to say this thing is good and the right is going to say this thing is good and it's authoritarian and you're coercive and you shouldn't do that.
All political regimes have some conception of the good.
Even you, Mr.
Libertarian, who are saying we need this kind of regime because that expands freedom the most, That is asserting a particular vision of the good.
Actually, though, even on a deeper level, liberty only makes sense if you have a conception of the good.
Because what is liberty?
Liberty is, in just a very practical way, it's how we intuit the good, right?
We have some sense of what is good for us, and then we pursue that.
We have freedom of choice to go and pursue that.
We can get deeper on liberty, but that's kind of the basic thing.
Liberty doesn't make any sense if you don't first presuppose a conception of the good.
And so I don't favor legalizing marijuana or making it easier to get, not because I have some abstract, absolute, ideological...
Opposition to it or even on the contrary support of it.
I just think, yeah, it's not good.
It's sort of foreign in the American tradition.
In the West, we've had booze for a very long time and it's served us well and there have been some excesses and we've kind of wrapped our minds around it and wrapped our livers around it.
Christ's first miracle is turning water into wine.
Booze plays an important role all the way throughout our history.
Marijuana is kind of a more recently introduced thing, so I'm just a little wary of it.
I'm a little skeptical of it, and I don't see any reason that we should introduce it.
I mean, it might be good for big Doritos, you know?
It might be good for the munchie industry, but I don't really see what it does for society.
And so I just have a much less rigidly ideological take on this.
And I think generally speaking, I love libertarians.
I think they're right on so many things.
But I think if libertarians were a little bit less ideological and a little bit more practical and a little bit more in tune with the tradition and just given into prudence, which is a very important virtue, I think that the two camps here would come together much more quickly and we'd have a much more sane politics.
Edmund Burke writes about this.
The difference between the English and the French And the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is the French Revolution was totally abstract and all about these random rights floating in the sky.
And the American Revolution understood rights and understood these kind of philosophical questions, but it was much more grounded in a practical tradition.
And I think we should...
Stick with that.
From Austin.
I love your show.
Appreciate any advice you can offer.
When my wife and I got married, I was a Christian in name only, and she was an atheist.
We agreed to raise our children as Christians.
Around six months ago, thanks to you and Matt Walsh, I started taking my faith seriously and converted to Catholicism.
Oh, terrific.
Very glad to hear that.
Since then, you've changed many aspects of my life.
I've asked my wife that when we have kids to go to church, to participate in the service, pray with them, not tell them that she's an atheist and live as a Christian, although she isn't one.
Understandably, she thinks this will make her miserable.
She has no interest in converting.
She wants me to handle the faith aspect of raising our children.
We argue about it frequently and it puts a strain on our relationship.
Am I wrong for expecting this of her?
And if I am, do you have any advice or suggestions?
A tricky situation, but we've all been there.
Well, maybe not all of us, but I certainly have been there in the sense that my wife and I have known each other since we were 10 years old.
We have at times believed very different things.
And actually, we used to believe very different things than even what we would believe now.
And what happens, I've noticed, is you either grow together or you grow apart.
You are the head of your household, and you should be the head of your household.
And especially if you're taking your faith seriously, because there's a whole lot about this in the Bible.
Your duty is to love your wife and to lead your household.
I totally sympathize with her.
This is not what she signed up for.
She did not sign up for this Catholic family.
And so she might be a little freaked out by it.
She might be a little freaked out by all the smells and bells at mass.
And I think that's understandable and you should respect that.
But the thing about the faith that I suspect has helped you come to it and come to it more seriously is that it is reasonable.
We can know the existence of God through our faculties of reason from nature.
This is in the catechism.
You can read your Thomas Aquinas.
So I think it should be very clear if she has an open mind and faculties of reason that she should come to recognize that God exists.
Once you realize God exists, then you have to ask questions about God.
You have to deal with the Reality of Christ and you have to determine what you think about the incarnation and claims of the resurrection and what that means.
And I just, I was an atheist for 10 years, so I totally understand your wife's Holdups.
But then I committed myself to studying the question and I came to this answer, you know, and I think reasonable people will come to that answer.
And in the meantime, you've got to love your wife, so I wouldn't, you know, I don't think you should be bickering about this all the time, but direct her to the Thomistic Institute, for instance, on YouTube.
Direct her to Patrick Madrid's show on the radio and you can get it on podcast.
It's a great call-in Catholic show.
Direct her to the Catechism.
Direct her to CatholicAnswers.com.
I think Catholic Answers is a great resource.
Direct her to various resources that can maybe help her understand this and keep the faith and lead your household, and I think it will serve you very well.
All right, last question.
I'm going to fit one in right at the end from Jerome.
Providential too.
Great saint who translated the Bible.
I appreciate the work you do.
I have one question.
Is it possible for committed conservatives who aren't independently wealthy to run for and win state or national elected office without selling themselves to interest groups?
For instance, I don't see how I could win office without millions of bucks in the bank to insulate myself and my family from the economic harm that the left dishes out.
No, it is not.
For very local offices it is.
For bigger offices it's not.
So it's much easier.
You're much more likely to be able to keep your integrity.
If you've got at least a little money in the bank.
If you don't, that's fine.
You need to have wealthy friends who are not going to pressure you to completely change your point of view.
It's very, very tricky.
And so you should work on making sure, if you are interested in running for office, that you are insulated from some of those threats because they come after a whole lot of people.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
See you Monday.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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