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March 12, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
53:23
Ep. 719 - 115 (More) Days To Slow The Spread

Joe Biden wants us to wait until 115 days to slow the spread, Amazon promises to ban books that question transgenderism, and Cuomo’s latest sex claim gets referred to the cops. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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After a full year since we were told 15 days to slow the spread, in his address last night to the nation, President Joe Biden finally gave us a timetable on when we can reopen the country.
If we do all this, if we do our part, if we do this together, by July the 4th, there's a good chance you, your families and friends will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout and a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day.
That doesn't mean large events with lots of people together, but it does mean small groups will be able to get together.
After this long, hard year, that will make this Independence Day something truly special, where we not only mark our independence as a nation, Well, we begin to mark our independence from this virus.
I think I'm going to mark my independence from you and all the other sociopath politicians who have the gall to stand there.
I did the calculation from last night until July 4th.
They're saying that they want another 115 days to slow the spread.
One year after 15 days to slow the spread, they want another 115 days to slow the spread.
How about we all just keep living our lives like some of us have been doing for a very long time now?
How about we ignore all these absurd mandates from these outrageous politicians?
How about we declare independence right now?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment from yesterday is from Irving, who says, no one, absolutely no one, Michael, you know this reminds me of my book.
That's true.
It does.
It reminds me of my book.
I think this is providential.
It's the sort of silver lining in this storm cloud of our politics right now because, coincidentally, the book that I've been writing for a year and a half now, which is coming out in June, is exactly about everything we're seeing right now, particularly with the curtailment of our speech and And the banning of books and the utter upending of our culture and our norms.
You can get that book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
You can pre-order that right now, but as we will see a little bit later, you may not be able to order it for very long because the largest bookseller in the world is coming out and saying that politically incorrect books, in many cases, are not going to be allowed.
You know, all these challenges notwithstanding, I still keep a lot of hope.
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The speech last night was absolutely pathetic.
If anybody...
If anybody is still heeding their guidelines, which are actually mandates, then that person is a dope.
And most of us, I think, figured this out quite a while ago.
Once that two weeks became three weeks, four weeks, two months, six months, eight months.
I think a lot of us realized, oh, this is not Exactly what we were told this is.
Oh, okay, we're going to stop paying attention to these guys.
When all the guidance kept changing day by day by day, I think a lot of us said, I think I'm going to ignore this now.
Joe Biden is carrying this on, it would seem to me, because he needs to burnish his legacy.
President Trump did everything that one can do as pertains to the virus before he left office.
Right?
Slowing the spread.
That worked.
They slowed the spread.
Preventing the two million deaths within a year that we were told could happen.
Yeah, prevented that.
Obviously, the number was much lower than that.
Developed a vaccine.
We were told by people such as Joe Biden that there was no way that Trump could direct a vaccine initiative in the small window of time that he said he would.
We did get the vaccine in that window of time.
So he did everything.
Now Joe Biden says, gosh, what's there for me to do?
I need to seem like Trump screwed up coronavirus and I succeeded on coronavirus.
So he's offering us something really, really big, really important.
If you're driving, I would stop.
If you're standing, I would sit down right now.
Here's Joe Biden's big innovation to help us all survive coronavirus.
At the time when every adult is eligible in May, we will launch with our partners to get vaccinated and the one nearest you.
Stop the presses!
I need to stop my show right now.
I need to process this huge news that Joe Biden's going to make a webpage.
Joe Biden, the President of the United States, has more resources at his fingertips than anybody in the world.
He is going to make a webpage.
And on top of that, you're going to get a webpage from the same people who brought you the Obamacare webpage.
So hire me to make the webpage, and I will go to WordPress, and I will make a more successful webpage than probably the federal government will.
Not so much, isn't that?
That's not so much of a big advance on the fight against coronavirus.
Then, what's next?
We're going to get a webpage because we all need to get the vaccine.
It was very interesting how much of a focus Biden put on you have to get the vaccine.
You need to get all your friends to get the vaccine.
Everyone needs to get the vaccine.
But also, of course, you need to keep wearing masks.
That's just the science.
Too often, we've turned against one another.
A mask.
The easiest thing to do to save lives.
Sometimes it divides us.
So our message to you is this.
Listen to Dr.
Fauci.
One of the most distinguished and trusted voices in the world.
Can you believe that masks, it's so easy, it's so obvious, saves lives, you should just...
Instantly, this is the first thing you should be doing.
That divides us.
That's become a divisive question.
Because people don't listen to Dr.
Fauci, the guy who told us not to wear masks.
Now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.
You're sure of it?
Because people are listening really closely to this.
Right now people should not be, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask.
When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet.
But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.
And often there are unintended consequences.
People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
Can you believe people are so divided and they won't do the obvious, sensible thing and wear the mask?
The people who are listening to Dr.
Fauci who told them not to.
Now, Dr.
Fauci, of course, changed his mind on this.
Later, he said, no, you really, you should wear the mask.
Definitely wear the mask.
And his reasoning for his past advice was that he wanted to keep enough masks for the healthcare workers.
So he said, yeah, we didn't want you peasants to take up all the good masks.
We wanted those to be for the people in public health.
But now we have enough masks, so now, yeah, actually, you totally should wear masks.
Everything I said before just wasn't true, so don't believe that.
Okay, regardless of your stance on the masks, if you're still wearing this filthy cloth over your face in public like a sheep, you know my views of it.
But regardless, let's say you wear it, you want to do it, you want to do what Joe Biden says.
Does Joe Biden not understand why people might be a little skeptical?
Because the single expert that he is holding up as the credible man here for the credible common sense advice, he's the one who not only first told us not to wear them, but then admitted that he misled us.
He admitted that he was acting in a way that was political and actually obscuring the scientific reality.
Now beyond the masks, beyond the website, Joe Biden knows we're going to get through these dark, dark times in our country by washing our hands.
We're seizing this moment in history I believe will record.
We faced and overcame one of the toughest and darkest periods in this nation's history.
Darkest we've ever known.
We need everyone to get vaccinated.
We need everyone to keep washing their hands, stay socially distanced, and keep wearing the mask as recommended by the CDC. Statesmanship in 1940s.
Winston Churchill.
We shall go on.
We should fight on the beaches and in the streets.
We shall never surrender.
Statesmanship in 2021.
Wear the mask.
Wear the mask.
Wash your hands.
You got to wash your hands.
Use soap and water.
Warm water, not cold water.
Cold water is not going to kill all the germs.
Got to wear the mask.
Got to wash your hands.
The notion that this is the darkest time in American history, forgive me if I think it's a little hyperbolic.
Is it not a little hyperbolic?
The Civil War, it was pretty dark, wasn't it?
World War II, both of the World Wars, pretty dark time in our history.
I don't mean to downplay the China cough.
It's bad.
It is bad.
It really is bad.
Worse than that?
Worse than the Civil War?
I don't think so.
I don't think he's convincing anybody.
Meanwhile, you've got these social repercussions like the schools, right?
The schools are still shut down.
Kids' rates of anxiety, depression, even suicide are spiking in a lot of places because they can't see their friends.
They can't leave their home.
They're stuck in their little pods.
Joe Biden, he's going to figure a way out of this.
Watching a generation of children who may be set back up to a year or more because they've not been in school because of their loss of learning.
It's the details of life that matter the most.
And we miss those details, the big details on the small moments, weddings, birthdays, graduations, all the things that needed to happen but didn't.
Yeah, we're missing those because of you and your political cronies.
We should have reopened schools months ago.
Even the public health experts said we should reopen schools months ago.
You won't let us.
Because you're in the pocket of the teacher unions.
Because of your purely political calculations.
Because you and all the other sociopath politicians have exploited the flu, or, you know, the virus, to seize an unprecedented amount of power in this country.
You, you're the problem.
You know, there was a little remarked upon aspect of this issue.
speech last night that it seemed like one of those Joe Freudian slips Joe was talking about the death and destruction of it and he referred to the virus and to natural causes leave behind loved ones unable to truly grieve or to heal even to have a funeral but I'm also thinking about everyone else who lost this past year to natural causes by cruel fate of accident or other disease they too died alone You catch that?
Wasn't that a little weird?
The whole time we've been told this is a naturally occurring virus.
It has nothing to do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It has nothing to do with any sort of scientific formulation or anything.
But then he says there are so many people who died of the virus, so many people who died.
And there are a lot of other people who died from natural causes.
WHO, by the way, says we're not going to know the full story on the virus for years.
I'm not, look, maybe Joe misread the teleprompter.
I don't know.
Seems like a little bit of a strange slip, though.
Probably going to get a lot of people chatting.
One way to relax among all of this mania.
Really, this speech last night actually did get my blood pressure up a little bit.
I was so furious about it.
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Joe Biden made it about 20 minutes in this address to the nation, which is longer than I think a lot of people thought it would be.
This is the one advantage over, of, of a president Biden over say a president Trump is when I would watch and have to cover these sorts of speeches with president Trump.
They could be three hours long.
They were very entertaining.
So I enjoyed watching them, but I thought, oh gosh, am I going to have a three hour Joe Biden speech?
I can't.
Oh, wait a second.
It's Joe Biden.
This thing's not going to go more than 20 minutes.
Joe Biden's got to get to bed.
This is way past his bedtime.
President Trump though, Actually offered a very pithy statement on the vaccine.
He sent this out just a couple of days ago, and I think it bears repeating on air, since he's now been deplatformed from social media.
We should get this statement as wide as possible.
He writes, quote, I hope everyone remembers when they're getting the COVID-19, often referred to as the China virus vaccine, that if I wasn't president, you wouldn't be getting that beautiful shot for five years at best, and probably wouldn't be getting it at all.
I hope everyone remembers...
He's probably right.
And the way that I think he probably is right is that all the experts were saying, you're not going to get this vaccine.
It's going to knock six months.
Are you crazy?
It's going to take years.
It's going to go on for years and years.
And then it happened.
It was guided by a political process that this guy was running.
So I love that.
I hope everyone remembers.
There's going to be a lot of people trying to rewrite history.
I miss that guy.
Speaking of missing men, speaking from men missing from our culture, I saw a letter written into Slate that really caught my attention.
One, because this poor schlub is showing that he is engaging in sort of bad thoughts and bad behaviors, but also he's exemplifying, I think, a lot about our culture.
Headline, I don't want my wife to become a stay-at-home mom.
Before the baby, she was ambitious.
What happened?
Then he goes on about how he's trying to convince her not to do that.
He says...
One of the things that I was most attracted to was her ambition and tenacity.
It's really surprising to hear that her career isn't that important to her anymore.
Honestly, I don't want her to quit her job.
She earns about the same as I do, and while we could make ends meet on my income alone, it would impact our ability to save.
And we'd need to give up one of our cars and cut back on extras that make life more enjoyable.
I also just don't want to stay at home wife.
I really admired her work ethic and I want her to set a good example for our daughter too.
Seeing her give up like this is really disappointing.
What should I do?
Signed, suddenly the breadwinner.
What should I do?
What should I do?
To quote the Godfather when he is asked that very question by Johnny Fontaine, You can act like a man!
What's the matter with you?
What's the matter with you?
What man?
This is the husband who wrote this letter.
This is putatively the husband who wrote this letter.
So many things wrong with him.
His wife has this daughter, and she has the audacity to want to raise her own daughter.
And you see, this is not ambitious.
If the wife goes to the widget factory and types all day on her keyboard and just does spreadsheets, you know, and makes widgets and, well, she doesn't make the widgets, but, you know, she's sort of supervising the people who have outsourced the widget making to the, and so she's doing that.
That's really ambitious.
But raising a human being, it's like, whatever.
Whatever.
You can just hire someone to do that.
You see, what this guy wants to do, he wants to send his wife to work for another man so that she can make money so that he can pay another woman to raise his child.
Because that's the way it's supposed to work.
That's ambitious.
Otherwise, you know, if the mother doesn't want to do this, she's just, she's giving up.
And can you believe this guy, I mean, I get it.
I share his outrage.
He's suddenly the breadwinner.
I mean, he makes plenty of money, but he might not be able to buy a new car next year.
Suddenly the breadwinner.
It's like this selfish woman expects her husband to provide for his family.
Can you imagine that?
While she raises his child.
Gosh, what a selfish woman.
What a lazy, selfish woman to want to raise her family and to want her husband to work and support the family.
This dude is everything wrong with our culture.
And even the perception of it.
I mean, maybe he comes by the perception, honestly, that raising a family is somehow giving up or it's lazy or it's not ambitious.
The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.
We used to know that.
We used to know that a mother with her child is the center of the world, of this world that we're all living in, is the absolute center.
Everything else that we do in this material world, in our economic life, all of it exists to serve that.
Not everybody gets to have children.
It's actually hard for a lot of people to have children.
For some people, they don't get that option.
But We can cast, oh, it's nothing.
Let's just pay somebody else to raise our kid.
That's the economic model.
I don't mean just to beat up on this guy.
I mean, this guy is truly a schmuck.
He is a girly man, as we say.
It reminds me of the distinction between womanly and womanish.
Womanly is a woman acting in a way that is proper for a woman to act.
Right?
It's not an insult.
It's a compliment.
Oh, she's so womanly.
Oh, my gosh.
When a man acts in a way that it is proper for a woman to act, there's nothing admirable about that because those qualities are corrupted.
They're perverse.
They're wrong.
It is womanish.
So when you call someone a girly man, it's not an insult against girls.
It's an insult against that guy because he's acting in a way that is so perverse.
But he's doing something that our whole culture is doing, and it's not just the left.
It's not just the left, though they sort of instigated it, especially in the 1970s, saying that the only values that matter are manly values and women need to be forced to go out and work.
Simone de Beauvoir, who was one of the most famous feminists ever, I guess, and was also, ironically, the jilted common law wife of a notorious philanderer, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
One time, Simone de Beauvoir was having a debate with Betty Friedan over feminism.
There's two prominent feminists.
And Friedan said, yeah, if women want to work, good.
If women want to stay home, good.
And Beauvoir said, no.
We can't give them that choice.
We have to force women to work.
Because if we give them the option to stay at home, they'll take that option.
And that is not conducive to liberation.
The left believes that, and the right believes that.
There are some proposals now to incentivize having families because we have a dying population and a birth rate below replacement.
And so some people, I think Rubio is the one who did this, said, we're going to incentivize work.
Romney's plan of direct payments to families who have kids, that's wrong.
We need to incentivize work.
We're the party of work.
No.
I think that if a woman wants to raise her family, that's a really good, wonderful thing.
That should be incentivized by society.
We should not force her to go out and work in the widget factory.
There's nothing conservative about forcing women out of their homes to pay some other woman to raise their kids so that they can go work at the widget factory and get a paycheck.
That is a totally perverse, ultimately liberal, left-wing view of mankind.
Viewing mankind as primarily an economic actor rather than what we really are, which is complex people with complex relationships born into families, born into communities who appreciate beauty, who serve God, who have more going on for them than their paychecks.
My only advice, I guess, would be to this woman, which is, are you sure you've made the best choices?
I'm not saying leave your husband, but maybe smack him around a little bit, get him to shape up.
Speaking of womanish men, This transgender issue is really popping up.
More and more, the left fighting back against the right fighting back against the left's idea that men need to become women.
You know my friend Ryan Anderson has this hilariously titled book, When Harry Became Sally, responding to the transgender moment.
This scholarly book was kicked out of Amazon, but Amazon wouldn't give a statement.
They now are giving a statement.
The statement is that we have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ plus identity as a mental illness.
So they're lumping in all of these various sexual identities.
So they're not going to sell those books.
But the DSM, the central text of psychology, declared...
These sorts of identities, a mental illness, until very recently.
So presumably, Amazon is not going to sell those scientific texts anymore.
And presumably, any conservative book, any conservative book that questions the transgender idea is liable to be canceled by Amazon.
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Amazon's decision to ban books...
That frame, quote, frame LGBTQ plus identity as mental illness is to affect it.
I'm not saying they're going to ban every conservative book.
I think that would be too dramatic in practice.
But it is to reserve the right to ban any conservative book that they want.
Because any conservative book that touches on Human nature, even.
Social questions, political questions.
It doesn't even have to be specifically on the transgender bathrooms or girls' sports or whatever.
But that touch in any way on human nature is liable to violate this policy.
If, for instance, I'm writing a book of, you know, it's not really newsy at all.
It's not one of these books dealing with issues of the moment.
Let's say it's the most scholarly, philosophical text out there that says...
That mankind is a union of body and soul.
And so if you're a man, you're a man.
You can't become a woman.
That could be banned.
What about religious texts?
I suppose religious texts do not present certain sexual identity as a mental illness.
They present sexual behavior that derive from those...
Now we call it identity, but the Bible and the Quran would talk about behavior.
They cast them as sin.
The Quran says that homosexuals, men who practice homosexual acts, should be punished.
So is Amazon going to continue to sell the Quran?
Presumably they will, because it would be very politically incorrect to ban the Quran.
What about the Bible?
What about the Bible that prohibits, castigates, cross-dressing, many sexual acts?
What about that?
Is the Bible going to be banned from Amazon?
No, I don't think they're going to do that.
Probably they wouldn't mind doing that, but it's this slow, gradual process.
Setting the precedent, establishing the premise, and then slowly, slowly enforcing it.
I bet there are going to be a lot of conservatives who say, okay, well look, either Amazon's a private company, they can do what they want.
That's what our founders wanted.
Or They'd say, well, you know, look, that's rude.
We shouldn't be rude to people and say that transgenderism is a mental illness, so, you know, we're just not good.
Okay, that's fine.
And then slowly, slowly, gradually, and then more quickly, the left is going to gain ground.
On the topic of weird sex stuff, the latest sexual allegation against New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo We covered it a little bit yesterday that Andrew Cuomo groped some woman.
It's a vague complaint.
Not sure that it's true.
It's now been referred to the Albany Police Department.
So this incident may have risen to the level of a crime.
Now, there's no evidence that the governor is being investigated by the police.
But the way that this is all playing out, to me, makes these accusations on sex less credible.
And it makes it clearer and clearer by the day that this is all just about getting rid of Cuomo because of his nursing home scandal.
Because Democrats are implicated in that scandal, whereas they're not implicated in him handing a hot dog sandwich.
Hot dog is a sandwich, by the way.
Handing a hot dog or sausage and pepper sandwich to a reporter and saying, you know, yeah, eat the hot dog.
You know, it's not about that.
And the Democrats are not implicated in that.
So if they can kill him for that reason, they'll do it.
When the real scandal here, of course, is on COVID. Have you followed the timetable here?
First timetable, Cuomo made people feel uncomfortable.
That's not doing very much.
He kissed a staffer once.
Okay, that's not really doing very much.
He gave a hot dog to a reporter.
Okay, that's not really doing very much.
He...
Touch someone inappropriately.
Okay, that's not doing much.
He groped a woman.
Okay, let's see.
This is going to the police.
Okay, let's see.
It's so gradual.
And the condemnations are so gradual.
Okay, now we're going to have AOC condemn him.
Now we're going to have Nancy Pelosi question him.
Now we're going to have some of the state Democrats start to come out against him.
Now we're going to have the majority leader of the New York State Assembly and the Senate Start to come out against him.
Now we're going to, and it's just so obviously calculated.
So it's weird.
In a way, I'm kind of defending Cuomo on these very vague personal allegations because that's not good enough for me.
Look, I don't think Cuomo should be the governor.
I want to get rid of him.
But I don't want that guy to go down alone.
This is not a single person scandal.
This is a much broader scandal, and I want a whole lot of New York State Democrats to go down for this.
I want to take all the focus off these stupid sexual allegations.
I want it all to be on the nursing homes.
New York politics, you'll notice, is relatively controlled.
It's a machine state.
There's a reason that the Cuomo name has been around for a long time in New York.
There's a reason his dad was a long-time governor, too.
It's a state that keeps a lot of tight control in the Democratic Party.
In other parts of our country, politics is becoming less and less controlled.
In Minnesota, there is a new autonomous zone around an area that is now dedicated to George Floyd, George Floyd Square.
There is a militant style group that's taken over a blocks long George Floyd site.
That's created a hostile situation.
This is according to News Nation.
People that want to go and support the George Floyd memorial don't feel a sense of inclusion.
There is more of a military-type atmosphere over there and a sense of fear, according to one Minneapolis resident.
So they're losing control, and this is what the left does.
The left uses these sort of paramilitary groups, Antifa, BLM, whoever's here at the George Floyd area, to upset the system, create a sense of urgency, and then come in and take more power and also Leverage this kind of violence against Republicans.
You saw this from the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris, who when BLM and her fellow travelers and Antifa and other radical groups were burning down the country, she said this can't stop, this won't stop.
This won't keep up the pressure on Republicans.
Now, as the trial about George Floyd's death gets underway as more evidence comes to light, as...
As the facts about George Floyd's life and behavior even on that day that the media suppressed are coming to light, maybe the cop who was involved will not be Or rather, will not be convicted.
If that is the case, you can expect a whole lot more autonomous zones and a lot more violence.
Before we go, I do have to mention, speaking of race hustling, you remember a while ago we talked about that gal, Amanda Gorman, who did the slam poem at the inauguration.
She did one at the Super Bowl too.
We went through the poem for a little bit and I pointed out that it's a very bad poem.
And as Harold Bloom, the literary critic said, slam poetry is the death of art.
And that shows how much our culture is decayed because this is simply about the appearance of poetry, You know, she's a young black woman, and she's performing this poem in a way.
The poem itself isn't any good, but the optics are so good, and we're so shallow as a culture now, that's all we care about.
Well, you know, I hate to say I told you so on the show.
I was proven right.
This poem is now being translated into Spanish.
And there was a translator, Victor Obiols, who was hired to do this.
But the editor of the Barcelona publisher told a news agency on Wednesday that once the translation was complete, the company received a request from the U.S. publisher, Viking Books, that they had to ditch that translation.
The translation had to be done by a female activist with African-American origins, if possible.
What?
What does the color or the sex of the translator have to do with the art, with the translation of the poetry, the actual work of art?
Nothing, of course.
Talent falls on anybody.
It falls on people in unexpected ways.
But they know the poem's no good.
It doesn't matter how the translation is.
It doesn't matter how the original poem is.
They know the poem's no good.
It's so not about that.
It's about the appearance.
It's a very shallow aspect for our culture, which is now being run by very shallow people who are telling us just 115 more days to slow the spread.
I don't believe them.
I'm not going to listen to them.
And I would encourage you to ignore the guidelines, which are actually just mandates.
Joe Biden coming out saying, you can do this, you can't do that.
I would encourage you.
To ignore them because I think they've lost all of their credibility and I think we can probably run our lives a lot better ourselves than they can run them for us.
You know, I think the world would be a better place too if people spent as much time reading books as they do scrolling through social media.
If you agree with me and you have been looking for a new title to check out, look no further.
The New York Times bestselling author and renowned podcast host and supreme leader of the multiverse, Andrew Klavan, has released the third and final installment of Another Kingdom.
Another Kingdom is the series that Drew and I worked on years ago, and we released it just as a podcast to see how it would do.
Drew did all the work writing it, and then I just voiced all the characters, and it jumped up the charts.
It became a very successful podcast.
It was renewed for a second and third season.
It was made into a book.
I happen to have done the audiobook, so if you just can't get enough of these dulcet tones, you can get the audiobook.
This series is one of the rare trilogies It gets better with each and every book.
The first one's terrific.
The next one's better.
The third one is really magnificent.
I kid you not, when I was reading these in the studio for the audiobook, at least one time with each book, I teared up.
I did.
You're going to make fun of me.
You're going to call me a girly man.
I did because it's really, really tremendous, tremendous work.
Go check that out.
Also, you know, We've announced on election night, now the wait is over, Candace Owens is premiering on her new Daily Wire show, Candace.
If it does very well, I think we're going to rename all the shows just our first names.
You know, it'd be Michael.
Ben.
Ben, one syllable, it's a little tougher that way.
Seriously, this is going to be a great show.
Candace, you know her.
She founded the Blexit movement.
She is changing the narrative surrounding America's minority communities.
She's the author of the New York Times bestseller, Blackout, How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation.
Join Candace every week.
She covers a host of different topics, from the latest trends to hard-hitting news.
Get to know the real Candace, funny, authentic, and insightful.
Find out why the left loves to hate Candace by going to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use code Candace for 25% off.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
First question in the mailbag from Veronica.
Hey Michael, love your show.
Thank you for all that you do.
I'm curious as to what your thoughts are about the deportation of former Nazi concentration camp guard Friedrich Karl Bürger.
Do you think that his deportation was the right thing to do?
Particularly thinking about him being a 19-year-old at the time who was likely brainwashed by Nazi propaganda throughout a good portion of his childhood.
Could this situation in a way be compared to No, I don't think it's comparable.
I don't think that this former Nazi is comparable in any way to George Washington.
However, it is a complex issue.
When you're 92 years old, What responsibility do you have for the things that you did when you were 19?
I think what this comes to is going to be a question of justice.
Mercy, sure, and justice.
So a lot of Nazis fled and they escaped justice.
And perhaps they led good lives.
Perhaps they tried to make amends.
But this gets to a point that Roger Scruton The late, great Roger Scruton, a conservative philosopher, who actually, I hosted an event at the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation yesterday with Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, and Robbie George at Princeton, which I think you can check out soon.
I think it's going to go online.
But anyway, Scruton made this point.
He said that civilization depends on confession and forgiveness.
Our ability to confess our sins, to say, you know, I did this and I have the sense of sin and I recognize it was wrong.
And when you do that, you sacrifice your pride, which is one of the reasons that the sacrament of confession is so important.
It is an action by which you must sacrifice your pride.
And acknowledge your sins.
And then forgiveness is when you say, okay, I forgive you and you sacrifice your resentment, which we all cherish as well.
We cherish our many resentments, so you both sacrifice something and you move on together as a people.
You do have to confess your sins.
You have to in some way seek justice.
Which I don't know if this guy did.
It seems like this guy didn't do it.
It seems like he was just kind of living on the lam for 70 years and then the past comes back and your past sins come back to visit you again.
The way that this does tie into cancel culture though is that cancel culture has totally removed the ability for confession and forgiveness.
In the past, if you made a mistake, you'd apologize.
You'd say, okay, I shouldn't have done that.
I'm sorry.
And then we'd say, okay, that's fine.
We accept your apology and that's why America is the country of second chances.
Or it was.
But now, you know you can't do that.
If you're in politics and you apologize in any way, You will be destroyed.
If you're in public life and you apologize in any way, you will be destroyed.
That's something that actually has changed in recent years because we are no longer willing to forgive as a people.
We're no longer willing to sacrifice our resentment.
Actually, our school curricula are being reformulated to stoke resentment.
The grievance studies programs that have cropped up at universities and now are even infecting high schools and middle schools and elementary schools.
That was what Harold Bloom, who was a liberal literary critic, he called it the school of resentment.
The purpose of it is to stoke resentment.
Meanwhile, on the other side of that, the confessional side, we now have transformed our culture from one in which we understood that pride is the queen of all vices, right?
It's the deadliest of the seven deadly sins.
Now we believe that pride is a virtue.
Pride is now celebrated in parades, right?
It used to be the case that pride was a stand-in for sort of gay parades.
But now it's really surpassed even that narrow sexual question.
Now it's just all sorts of pride, right?
Fat pride, skinny pride.
Pride is considered to be a good thing, but pride is not.
Pride is what caused the fall of mankind.
So in that sort of a culture, then yes, I suppose there is a sort of...
There is a tie-in to cancel culture here, but really I think the question ultimately is one of justice and mercy, will and grace.
In a right society, what you would be able to do is confess your sins, take your punishment, and move on.
And we would all move on together.
But if you refuse to confess your sins, if you refuse to take your punishment, if you refuse to do your penance, and if we, on the other hand, refuse to forgive, then you can't have that in society.
From Jacob, Ciao, Signore e Knowles!
I was watching a video of Casey Cole, a Franciscan, explaining that the only way of salvation is to help the poor.
He was explaining that Christ also asked if people fed him and clothed him and so on.
He said it is not enough just by practicing the sacraments and practicing and preaching the gospel.
Would you agree that helping the poor is important to attain salvation?
Well, we are saved by the grace of God, and then responding to God's grace in an act of faith.
So that's how we do it.
This is not simply done as an act of the intellect, right?
There is an action of the intellect here, but faith also looks like something.
Christ says, there are many people who will call me Lord, Lord, who I do not know, who will not be saved.
So it's not merely an act of speech and the intellect.
It actually has to be embodied.
Ours is an incarnational faith.
So I haven't listened to what this Franciscan has said, but in as much as he's saying that our...
The theological virtue of charity looks like something, and our faith looks like something, and it impels us to give alms, and sure, okay, that makes sense.
But if he's saying, and I suspect he's not, if he's implying, though, that somehow you are saved by the act of giving money to the homeless guy, that would be the heresy of Pelagius.
That would be...
Salvation through works, which is not true.
I suspect that this Franciscan would be formed well enough not to be saying that, but I can understand how that could be misinterpreted.
So yeah, that would not be the case.
From Kelly.
Hey, Michael.
First of all, congrats on your baby boy.
Thank you.
So I'm wondering, it was Dr.
Seuss, then a few Looney Tunes characters.
What pop culture books, characters, etc., do you think will be canceled next?
Thank you.
Huh.
Well, I mean, this is a little bit of a cop-out, but I think more Dr.
Seuss will be cancelled, and I think more Looney Tunes will be cancelled, and I think that more Disney will be cancelled too.
You're already seeing some attacks on Disney.
There was a headline the other day that Disney is a park of privilege, and there's not equity there, so you're going to see some of that crop up as well.
The reason that those guys are going to be cancelled is, one, because...
Some of the cultural observations that they make, or even just some of the jokes that they make, contravene and contradict the politically correct orthodoxy of the day.
And the left can't tolerate that, not for any principle, just because it's a challenge to their power.
But also, I was just re-watching Fantasia.
I was re-watching some of the old Looney Tunes cartoons that were put to classical music, and they're really brilliant.
They're really, really brilliant because they are educating people.
They are entertaining and educating toward people's higher faculties.
It's not just a bunch of cheap jokes and constant feeding of our lower appetites.
They're much higher.
When you watch Fantasia, it's truly an artistic experience.
And the same is true of those old Looney Tunes cartoons.
And that's something that the left, I think, really does not want to have happen.
This is why the left is always pushing toward our baser desires, trying to remove, most notably, prohibitions on obscenity.
Because when you can arouse people's prurient interest, when you can arouse people's kind of baser desires, then they're not going to be thinking with their higher reason, and they're going to be easier to control.
So I could see that happening.
And it's They'll come up with some excuse about race or sex or something, but that's going to be the real reason they're doing it.
From Matt, Michael, in the past you've said the only good argument against the existence of God is the problem of evil.
And I think this is a good point.
I'll put a pause right there.
I think it's the best argument against the existence of God, but actually I think theodicy, the problem of suffering and evil, is an argument for God.
I think it's a much better argument for God than against God.
But anyway, see your point.
However, I'm curious.
What do you think is the best argument against Christianity, and why do you think that argument falls short?
Love the show.
Keep up the good work.
Well, the best argument against Christianity is that Christ is not who he says he is, right?
And C.S. Lewis answered this with the three L's.
He says, Christ can either be a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord.
So either he's just a complete nut, and the things he's saying are not true, but he really believes them.
Or he knows that what he's saying is not true, but he's deceiving people anyway.
To what end?
To the point of the cross, okay.
Or he really is the Lord.
I think these fall apart because, one, when you encounter Christ in the Gospels, he doesn't seem like a lunatic, and the people around him don't behave as though he's a lunatic.
As to the liar point, it's hard to see what he would gain from his behavior.
He knows that he is there to die, to go to the cross.
So if he's just a con man, he's really not behaving like a con man.
And then the only other option is that he's the Lord.
Now there's this fourth option, which is that it's legend.
I've had some Jewish friends of mine say this.
Well, no, Michael, it's just a legend.
We can't rely on the Gospels that were written so much later.
And, you know, it's just there's no evidence that this stuff really happened.
I think that falls flat.
I think that's a little bit of a cope for people who don't want to engage in the first three arguments as well.
One, we have so many eyewitnesses to it.
So you've got the gospel accounts, which were written not particularly long after Christ's death.
They were all written actually rather soon after Christ's death and resurrection.
But you have hundreds and hundreds of eyewitnesses to the resurrection itself.
You have non-biblical accounts of Christ and early Christianity.
You have the lives of the apostles, which don't make any sense if it's a legend.
Why these people would travel to the ends of the earth, going to their deaths, in most cases, because of a legend, because of a joke, because either they were all fooled, wow, it's amazing that they were all fooled at once, or that, I guess the legend argument requires that they were fooling everybody else, but again, to what end?
So that St.
Thomas could die in India?
So that Peter could be crucified upside down?
So that Paul could have his head cut off?
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
So, you know, I... All the challenges to Christianity would be challenges on the fact of Christ and his life and the miracles.
But I just don't think they really hold up to scrutiny.
One way to think of it is that...
Another good argument, I think Tim Keller made this, the Protestant pastor.
He said that if this were just a legend, then the Gospels would have been written differently.
But when you read great myths and great legends, they read differently than the Gospels do.
The Gospels read much more like journalism, right?
The Gospels are not really so much an act of poetry or philosophy as they are an act of journalism.
And it's why in some details there seem to be some discrepancies between the, because there are accounts.
It'd be like reading the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Well, it's quite the opposite of that, actually.
because the gospels are true and the Washington Post and the New York Times, you know, are not.
But it's why the different Gospels actually are focusing on different aspects.
They're seeing things from a different vantage.
To me, these are all pretty good arguments that it's true.
From Paul, Dear Michael.
Dear, my question for you involves a burden I've been carrying since the summer of 2019, a burden which has grown heavier with each new Daily Wire membership tier that I've joined.
In the summer of 2019, I fell in love with a girl in a Bernie Sanders t-shirt.
It happens to the best of us.
I will spare you the details, but nothing long-term ultimately transpired for reasons having nothing to do with politics.
The weight of knowing I looked the other way on the Bernie Sanders t-shirt, however, as well as the fear that I might do it again, remain with me to this day.
I'm overcome with guilt and shame.
Is my great sin forgivable?
How can I live with myself?
How can I prevent this from ever happening again to myself, my family, and my friends?
I'll be forever indebted to you for any wisdom you can provide.
I beg you, please not mention this to Matt as my actions would surely banish me forever from his channel.
I come to you as I know you are a man of grace.
Yours truly.
We've all done it.
I remember William F. Buckley Jr., a great conservative, was on Woody Allen's show one time, and he was asked by a young girl, he said, do you approve of miniskirts?
And his answer was, on you I do.
I think that good legs are always in good taste.
So, you know, these things happen.
I actually think that this is an opportunity for you not to be like this poor schlub from Slate magazine complaining about how his wife isn't making enough money for him.
This is an opportunity for you, if you see a cute gal wearing that Bernie shirt, you spy her and her cute little blue hair across the room with her ridiculous hipster glasses on, you know, and her air of sort of feisty resentment at the world, to look at her and say, you know, listen, you're a cutie, I know you've got a heart of gold deep down there somewhere, and I... In my leadership capacity, I'm going to guide you toward truth.
I'm going to guide you away from your misconceptions.
That seems to me a wonderful challenge.
But make sure you can do that.
Otherwise, you're really setting yourself up for trouble.
Do not wind up like another Prince Harry.
Okay, that's our show.
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.
Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
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