CNN doesn’t believe doctors can know a baby’s sex at birth, Hollywood boycotts Georgia over election integrity measures, and a prominent newsman says fairness is overrated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| CNN is spatting off on science again, and they seem pretty confused. | |
| CNN reporting yesterday that there is no consensus on how to assign sex at birth. | |
| They write, quote, It's not possible to know a person's gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth. | |
| Now, listen, I'm no doctor. | |
| You know, I didn't go to medical school. | |
| I'm no biologist. | |
| I think that... | |
| With 100% certainty, I will always be able to know whether a little boy is a little boy or whether he's a little girl. | |
| More broadly, if we cannot know, if we cannot know for sure the difference between little boys and little girls, there is no hope for self-government. | |
| Not surprised CNN is confused. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Welcome back to the show. | |
| My favorite comment yesterday comes from Alex Z, who says, Knowles' transitions of promoting his book are as seamless as the pre-order process for Speechless. | |
| Controlling words, controlling minds. | |
| Available now on Amazon. | |
| That's true. | |
| Also, by the way, that was a great thank you so much for that transition, Alex. | |
| Some people have written in and they've wanted to know if they can get an autographed copy, and I don't really know because I'm not particularly involved in the process. | |
| of putting this out in different stores and all that. | |
| But I Googled it yesterday after I got some emails and it turns out you can pre-order an autographed first edition of the book. | |
| You can do that at Premier Collectibles. | |
| So if you're interested, head on over there. | |
| It just, it's so much easier than, you know, having to wait in a long line to do something. | |
| Same thing could be true of auto parts. | |
| If you want to get auto parts and you don't want to wait in line and you don't want to pay twice as much and you don't, Go to rockauto.com. | |
| Great family business. | |
| Great supporters of the show. | |
| Rockauto.com is so much easier than walking into a store and someone demanding quick answers to things like, hey, is your Odyssey an LX or an EX? I don't know. | |
| I don't know what kind of X my Odyssey is. | |
| Then, you know, you go out. | |
| I'll go back and say, okay, it's this kind of X. And they'll say, okay, they go in the back. | |
| They don't have the part. | |
| They go online. | |
| They look up the part. | |
| They order it probably from rockauto.com. | |
| They come out. | |
| They charge you twice as much. | |
| Don't do that. | |
| It's humiliating. | |
| You can go to rockauto.com right from your desk, right from your cell phone. | |
| You head on over there. | |
| It's a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years. | |
| Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers. | |
| The catalog is so easy to navigate. | |
| Somehow, even I can do it. | |
| They're not gimmicky with their prices. | |
| It's not like a Tuesday, you know, it's 50% more and then Wednesday. | |
| No, they're just always reliably low. | |
| Same prices for pros and do-it-yourselfers. | |
| Head on over to rockauto.com right now. | |
| Check out all the parts available for your car or truck. | |
| And they're, how did you hear about us, box? | |
| So they know we sent you. | |
| You need to be able to know things if you are going to govern yourselves. | |
| So you need to be able, I'm not saying you need to have 100% You need to be part of the broader conversation that we have in our country and in our civilization. | |
| You need to be able to use your faculties of reason and your moral conscience to separate good from bad and right from wrong and true from false. | |
| And if you can't do that, you can't rule yourself. | |
| While CNN is pretending that we can't know whether to put the blue hat or the pink hat on the newborn baby, while the elites are pretending not to know the most obvious things on earth, You'll notice that gender reveal parties are gaining steam. | |
| It seems like every week now we're hearing about gender reveal parties. | |
| This was not really a thing when I was little. | |
| This is clearly becoming more of a cultural norm. | |
| I actually was tempted to do it myself for Sweet Little Junior. | |
| When he was going to come out, sweet little Lisa thought that this was just too ridiculous and that as a self-respecting man, I should not be as excited to do this. | |
| But the idea is you go and the doctor figures out the sex of the baby, which they can now do very early on, and then they write it down on a sheet of paper, and then, I don't know, maybe you bring that to a baker, and you say, you know, if it's a boy, then bake me a cake with blue frosting on the inside. | |
| And if it's a girl, bake me a cake with pink frosting on the inside. | |
| And Now these rituals have become much more elaborate. | |
| There have been stories about people setting off fireworks and getting harmed in the way, by the way. | |
| People have died during these gender reveal parties. | |
| So there was actually a very sad story in Mexico. | |
| A couple hired some people to fly a plane with the gender reveal on the back of it. | |
| And then, very tragically, the plane crashed. | |
| I think two people died in this... | |
| Incident, which is awful. | |
| I mean, accidents happen, but it is strange that we keep hearing about all of these accidents for gender reveal parties. | |
| Does this mean that no one should ever have a gender reveal sort of party ever again? | |
| No, I don't think so. | |
| Sad things happen. | |
| The plural of anecdote is not data. | |
| However, it does speak to a problem that we have as a society, which is We're making too big a deal out of ordinary things. | |
| You see this most especially with weddings. | |
| As the weddings get more and more and more elaborate, it seems like marriage rates are declining and divorce rates are skyrocketing and marriage itself means less of what it once did. | |
| As proposals, wedding proposals become more and more and more elaborate, the institution of marriage becomes much more confused. | |
| As the Gender reveal parties become more and more and more elaborate. | |
| Our grasp on what sex even is becomes more confused. | |
| I think we're over-rationalizing things here. | |
| I think everything's such a big deal that we... | |
| I know people who won't get married because they don't have $50,000 saved up to have a big, fancy, elaborate wedding. | |
| That is a new phenomenon. | |
| People used to just get married. | |
| Even rich people had smaller affairs than we do now. | |
| There are people who want to take everything that we used to just do as a matter of course in society and agonize over it and try to figure out, is little Johnny really little Johnny or do I need to watch if he ever reaches for a Barbie? | |
| Is he little Jane? | |
| I think that this is very likely a Just the consequence of this critical process we've had in society. | |
| This is actually something you hear a lot about in the academy. | |
| Critical race theory, or critical theory more broadly, or the ruthless criticism of all that exists, which coincidentally I mention quite a lot and describe in detail in my book Speechless. | |
| This has been an organized effort to analyze and criticize every single aspect of society, to deconstruct it. | |
| The end point of that is we can't do anything natural anymore. | |
| We can't just go get married. | |
| Let's do it. | |
| Let's fall in love. | |
| Now it's, well, we need to have a relationship. | |
| And it's got to be very clinical. | |
| And maybe we're going to have a new kind of strange relationship. | |
| And maybe we're going to have a throuple, like you see on those weird TV shows. | |
| And maybe we're going to... | |
| If we get married, we're going to have to delay the wedding by two years of an engagement. | |
| And then, you know, it's... | |
| We're so clumsy about everything we do in society right now. | |
| Why can't we just act normally, for lack of a better word? | |
| Why is everything so in question? | |
| National borders are now in question. | |
| Whether or not a country is allowed to have borders, that's now somehow a disputed matter. | |
| Whether you salute the American flag and stand for the national anthem, that is now a disputed matter. | |
| Whether you should have ballot integrity, that is now a disputed matter. | |
| We can't do any of the basic things that you need to do to get to the higher questions of society. | |
| I'll give you another example of this. | |
| Juan Williams on Fox News. | |
| I actually really like Juan Williams. | |
| He's always been very nice to me and I find a lot of his commentary at least thought provoking. | |
| But he gave a pretty weak answer the other day. | |
| He He was asked about that awful carjacking of those two young girls who, there was two young black girls who carjack a Pakistani guy and then kill him. | |
| And then callously, they just don't care at all. | |
| They walk back to the crime scene, past his dead body because one of the girls forgot her cell phone in the car. | |
| And this topic was brought up in a discussion and Juan Williams tried to find every elaborate answer except for the obvious one. | |
| I think in part, what it is, is you got... | |
| It's tragic. | |
| I mean, you got these teenage girls. | |
| I mean, they're little kids. | |
| They're not gangsters. | |
| They're not hardened criminals. | |
| I don't think they intended to kill anybody. | |
| They were looking to have a joyride, and it just went way wrong, way out of control, and ended up in a gross tragedy. | |
| I mean, this is unbelievable. | |
| Their lives are ruined. | |
| Well, they brought a stun gun, so usually you don't bring a stun gun to a joyride. | |
| No, I just think... | |
| Correct. | |
| I mean, it's like, you know, kids finding guns in their parents' house. | |
| I don't know what to say, Jesse. | |
| It's awful. | |
| It's a terrible situation. | |
| So the question is, why would these girls do it? | |
| And Juan's answer is, you know, that maybe they weren't trying to carjack the guy, and maybe they actually weren't just callously disregarding his life. | |
| Maybe they wanted to go for a joyride. | |
| And then Jesse Waters says, well, you know, they brought a stun gun with them. | |
| Yeah, well, maybe they, yeah, and maybe their parents just left that around, and maybe it was all a big accident. | |
| Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding. | |
| Maybe they're really good kids. | |
| Maybe the simplest answer is the correct one. | |
| Maybe they're just bad kids, and we all have fallen, broken nature, and some people turn out worse than others, and maybe they just did a very evil thing because they had evil motivations, and they don't care about human life, and they, at the very least, need to be locked up forever. | |
| There's this concept of Occam's razor, which, without being too elaborate about it, is this idea that all things being equal, the simplest explanation for a phenomenon should be preferred to unnecessarily complex answers for it. | |
| What happened to that in our culture? | |
| Why can't we get back to Occam's culture? | |
| Why is it that if I look at a little boy and he looks like a little boy and he has all the body parts of a little boy and his DNA is that of a little boy, why do I have to be confused about that and say, well, we don't know. | |
| Why can't we just accept what is obviously true before our eyes? | |
| If our country that we are now told is the worst country in the world and it's the source of evil in the world and we need to destroy our country and open up the borders and we owe everything to everybody... | |
| Why is it that everyone from the rest of the world wants to come here? | |
| Why is it that we have to have such a robust security system on our border? | |
| Why is it that millions of people come here every single year? | |
| Is it possible that the simplest solution is the correct one? | |
| Is it possible that we're just a good country and an attractive place to live and have your life and raise your family? | |
| Is that possible? | |
| No. | |
| Somehow, we are preferring the most ridiculous Rube Goldberg complex Mark Hamill is showing this recently. | |
| Luke Skywalker, he's advancing this narrative that America is a terrible country. | |
| He tweets out, no more filming in Georgia. | |
| No more filming in the state of Georgia, not the country of Georgia, because Georgia passed an election integrity law after they upended so many of their election measures in the 2020 election. | |
| So there's no more filming. | |
| Hollywood boycotting Georgia. | |
| Why? | |
| Why is Hollywood boycotting Georgia? | |
| Well, because they might have some voter ID. Maybe. | |
| They might make people vote in person more often than they vote by mail. | |
| They might not let you buy votes at the polling place. | |
| Mark Hamill filmed the first Star Wars in Tunisia. | |
| Okay, Tunisia's got some problems. | |
| Hollywood films in a lot of places that have a lot of problems. | |
| But they never worry about anyone else's problems. | |
| They only focus in on the sins and even the false sins, the totally contrived, fabricated sins of America. | |
| What if instead of, and then they'll say, well, hold on guys, how are you saying America's worse than some of these other places in the world? | |
| They'll say, well, because actually, secretly, America in her innermost sin is, and so she looks really good, but she's really evil. | |
| Yeah, we heard this example the other day. | |
| If a racial minority attacks another racial minority, actually secretly, that's white supremacy. | |
| How about you just, how about we just go for the simplest answer? | |
| Is that so hard? | |
| I hope that's not so hard. | |
| Hollywood is not the only group doing this. | |
| Delta Airlines, I guess the most woke airline as far as I can tell, Coca-Cola too, are joining the bandwagon of people criticizing Georgia for trying to protect the election. | |
| They are sending out these mass missives saying, you know, yes, this, this is terrible. | |
| We oppose this. | |
| What do I care what the CEO of Delta thinks? | |
| Well, cause we have a hub in Delta. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, I'm, I'm all for free markets. | |
| as you know. | |
| If you are using your corporate power to undermine the basic protections of our constitutional republic, I'm against you. | |
| I don't support that. | |
| You shouldn't be allowed to do that. | |
| I don't know what political power the Republicans in Georgia have right now over these companies. | |
| But they should exercise it. | |
| If that's removing certain tax breaks, if that is removing certain privileges that these companies have, they should exercise that. | |
| We should not permit corporations to run roughshod over our culture and upend our constitutional norms any more than we would want the government to do that. | |
| Very bad stuff. | |
| What if, instead of the woke, Delta, Coca-Cola, Hollywood explanation of this Georgia law that just brings back some very basic voter integrity measures, what if that's not about white supremacy and racism and suppressing the vote? | |
| What if it's just because people want fair elections? | |
| Is that possible? | |
| When voter ID is put up to public opinion surveys, everyone wants it. | |
| Every demographic group votes for voter ID. It's white supremacy. | |
| Well, black people support voter ID. Isn't that weird? | |
| It's going to suppress immigrants. | |
| Hispanic people support voter ID. Everyone does because it makes sense. | |
| It's so obvious. | |
| The people who oppose voter ID are the people who want to steal elections. | |
| It's that simple. | |
| It's really not complicated. | |
| The Washington Post, as left-wing an outlet as the Washington Post, admits that the narrative on the Georgia law, the narrative that Joe Biden is pushing, is BS. Joe Biden says that the new law in Georgia is going to shrink the opportunities of people to vote. | |
| Here is what the Washington Post fact checker says. | |
| On election day in Georgia, polling places are open from 7 a.m. | |
| to 7 p.m. | |
| And if you are in line by 7 p.m., you are allowed to cast your ballot. | |
| Nothing in the new law changes those rules. | |
| However, the law did make some changes to early voting. | |
| But experts say the net effect was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them. | |
| So even the freaking Washington Post... | |
| As left-wing a mainstream outlet as it gets, is admitting that Joe Biden and the Democrats' narrative and Coca-Cola's narrative and Delta's narrative on the Georgia voting law is not only false, it's perfectly false. | |
| It's the opposite. | |
| It's the exact opposite of true, of what's really going on. | |
| Now, I've got to give credit where credit is due. | |
| The Washington Post was being fair there. | |
| Doesn't always happen. | |
| Sometimes, though, there's, I guess, a little pang of the old institution in these places. | |
| And more than that, I think they realize that some of the narratives that the left is pushing are just so beyond the pale that they're not going to be politically very effective. | |
| So the Washington Post is being fair. | |
| A prominent journalist, however, is in hot water right now for saying that fairness is overrated. | |
| Lester Holt of NBC News was winning some award and he zoomed in to accept the award and he gave his sort of theory of journalism. | |
| And one of the lines that he's really catching a lot of flack for is that fairness is overrated. | |
| I think it's become clearer that fairness is overrated. | |
| Well, before you run off and tweet that headline, let me explain a bit. | |
| The idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in. | |
| That the sun sets in the West is a fact. | |
| Any contrary view does not deserve our time or attention. | |
| I know recent events assure that you won't have to look far to find more current and relevant examples. | |
| I think you get my point. | |
| Decisions to not give unsupported arguments equal time are not a dereliction of journalistic responsibility or some kind of agenda. | |
| In fact, it's just the opposite. | |
| Providing an open platform for misinformation, for anyone to come say whatever they want, especially when issues of public health and safety are at stake, can be quite dangerous. | |
| Our duty is to be fair to the truth. | |
| Holding those in power accountable is at the core of our function and responsibility. | |
| Lester Holt is absolutely right. | |
| On the point about fairness, what he's implying, I think, and if you listen to the rest of his speech, you'll see he's implying that basically the conservatives are the bad guys and the liberals are the good guys, at least in recent history. | |
| So he goes off on Donald Trump and he's saying, yeah, we shouldn't be totally fair by giving Trump supporters or President Trump himself equal airtime or anything like that. | |
| So obviously I disagree with that point. | |
| But on the procedural point, That fairness is overrated? | |
| Whatever we even mean by fairness today? | |
| The idea that you should hear both sides of any question equally? | |
| Lester Holt is absolutely right. | |
| And the left understands this. | |
| And the right used to understand this. | |
| And the left tricked the right into not understanding this, which is why we are in our present confusion. | |
| This is why, for instance, conservatives now embrace free speech absolutism. | |
| Whatever that means. | |
| Free speech absolutism is very different than the actual American free speech tradition of our founding fathers and all the men who built this country and the men before our founding fathers and the broader Anglo tradition. | |
| Free speech has always had some limits on it. | |
| We've mentioned it on this show many times. | |
| Sedition, threats, fraud, fighting words, obscenity. | |
| There have always been limits on these things. | |
| Free speech absolutism says there can be no limits whatsoever, but that's not practical. | |
| It's not possible because we need to get along together in society. | |
| Words have to mean certain things. | |
| Words cannot just mean whatever we want them to mean. | |
| And if words mean certain things, then words actually can infringe on people's rights. | |
| Fraud is a clear example of this. | |
| If you use your speech to commit fraud, you are committing a crime. | |
| That speech cannot be permitted. | |
| If you are using your speech for obscenity, We could go on for hours about what the Founding Fathers had to say about that. | |
| The right in America used to acknowledge that there is objective truth and that we can know certain truths. | |
| William F. Buckley Jr. | |
| put it in this very silly phrase. | |
| He said that he was an epistemological optimist. | |
| Certain things are settled and we ought to acknowledge them as settled. | |
| No one thinks that there should be some kind of constitutional right to scream Zig Heil at the water cooler at the office and have you keep your job. | |
| No one really believes that. | |
| We on the right now adopt the language of believing that because we pretend to be free speech absolutists who believe that everything ought to be in the free marketplace of ideas. | |
| But of course, marketplaces have rules that are set by the broader political regime and the broader political tradition. | |
| We should not tolerate in the academy, in the classroom, or in many other places in our public sphere, the idea that men are really women and therefore we should pump kids full of hormones and chop off their appendages. | |
| That is not an idea that we should tolerate. | |
| It's just not true. | |
| It's patently false. | |
| There's no argument for it. | |
| The only way you can make an argument for it is by making an argument to undermine reason. | |
| In the classroom, specifically, we have this question of critical race theory. | |
| Should this sort of thing be taught in public schools, let's say? | |
| No, it should not. | |
| Because it's not merely some radical idea that perhaps will broaden our perspective. | |
| It is, as Chesterton said, the thought that stops thought. | |
| It is an idea that undermines our acknowledgement of reason. | |
| It is an idea that undermines the purpose of education. | |
| You have to get rid of that. | |
| And no notion of fairness should impel us to give equal weight to those things. | |
| When the left speaks, I think very often the right just wants to dismiss it. | |
| But I think we should take a lesson from them. | |
| This is the thing that I try to do in my book, Speechless, available now for pre-order. | |
| You know, this show that we're on right now, At The Daily Wire. | |
| This show is available to everybody. | |
| It's available on YouTube. | |
| It's available on Facebook. | |
| It's available all over the place, at least for a lot of the show. | |
| But we have a new show at The Daily Wire that is not available to everybody all the time. | |
| That show, of course. | |
| is Candace. | |
| Candace. | |
| Candace Owens' new show is available exclusively to Daily Wire members, so if you are not a member yet, go to dailywire.com slash subscribe. | |
| Use code Candace to get 25% off. | |
| That is code Candace, C-A-N-D-A-C-E, for 25% off. | |
| Join now so you can tune in Friday night for a closer look behind her hot takes. | |
| Head on over to dailywire.com. | |
| We'll be right back with a lot more. | |
| Some unfortunate news for Holy Week. | |
| Church membership in the United States is below 50% for the first time ever. | |
| This, according to New Gallup, Poll, Americans' membership in houses of worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup's eight-decade trend. | |
| In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999. | |
| So the way this is being reported is that this is a massive decline in the religiosity of Americans. | |
| But I don't think that's true. | |
| I think it's just a change in the religiosity of Americans. | |
| I think that in 1999, 70% of Americans were Christian. | |
| And a much smaller number were Muslim or Jewish. | |
| And I think now... | |
| 47% are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. | |
| And 53% are something else. | |
| Because to quote Bob Dylan, everybody's got to serve somebody. | |
| Everybody has religious views. | |
| Everybody. | |
| The most hardened atheist has religious views. | |
| Because man is a religious being. | |
| Because all human conflict, at the end of the day, is theological. | |
| And because we have natural religious longings in our core. | |
| So, some people are Christians. | |
| They believe that God sent his only begotten son to die for mankind and redeem us, to die for our sins, to be crucified and buried on Good Friday, and to rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday, and then to ascend to heaven and sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and that he will one day come again to judge living and the dead. | |
| That is a creed for Christians. | |
| If you are, let's say you're an atheist right now. | |
| But you're a woke atheist. | |
| Then you believe that little boys can be little girls. | |
| That is a religious view. | |
| What you are saying is that the soul, we have souls, first of all, that our souls are totally different from our bodies, and when there is disagreement between our soul and our body, that the soul wins out, that we are metaphysical beings, essentially, and that the physical world has nothing to do with it, and frankly can be evil because it contradicts our metaphysical truth. | |
| Okay. | |
| If you are, I don't know, one of these people who says, I'm spiritual but not religious. | |
| You are religious. | |
| You're just narcissistic as well. | |
| I hate to be harsh about it, but I once heard a comedian describe spiritual but not religious as the same thing as saying, I don't really care that much about God, but I'm very interested in myself. | |
| Okay. | |
| What does it mean to be spiritual but not religious? | |
| Or to say, you know, I'm very interested in spirituality, but I'm not interested in organized religion. | |
| What it means is, I'll give a more charitable read of it. | |
| It means you have natural religious longings, and you acknowledge them, and you recognize that obviously there is something beyond this physical world, because the world doesn't make any sense if there isn't. | |
| But you just don't care to think systematically about it, and you don't want the Transcendent moral order to make any demands of you, and you don't want to have to acquiesce to those demands. | |
| And I say this as someone who for a period of time might have called himself spiritual but not religious, so I get it. | |
| I understand why that's compelling and why it's very fashionable today. | |
| But that is a sort of religion, whether one wants to admit it or not. | |
| The most hardened materialist, let's say an outright communist in the streets who says, you know, there is no God, religion is the opium of the people, and we need to build the progressive society here on earth because of the science of history. | |
| I know that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice, and progress is in the way, and you're on the wrong side of history. | |
| That is a religious view. | |
| That is a sort of eschatological view. | |
| It's a view that sees the end times, but the end time that those sorts of people would see is a happy one, one where we build this wonderful society and the state falls away and we're all living in this utopia. | |
| That is a religious view as well. | |
| You can't evade it. | |
| And people who convince themselves that they're not religious, I think, often fall into these problems. | |
| Much better, I think, to acknowledge, yes, you are necessarily going to have religious views, because our very faculties of reason rest on certain religious foundations. | |
| And then you have to start thinking about those views. | |
| What does that mean? | |
| Does that mean that I acknowledge that God exists? | |
| Well, if God exists, what does that mean? | |
| Does that mean I have to grapple with the person of Christ? | |
| What does that mean for other religions? | |
| What does that mean for my behavior today? | |
| What does that mean for how I should live my life? | |
| I urge the 53% of Americans who are confused on this issue, Don't be duped. | |
| Don't be distracted. | |
| Don't be fooled by people who are trying to take your attention away from serious and eternal things. | |
| One sort of joke of this whole survey is, you know, gosh, can you believe that people left church in such high numbers in 2020? | |
| Yeah, I can because the powers that be wouldn't let us go to church for a very long period of time. | |
| Remember when the public health officials, who are actually the priests of our secular religion, and who perform the liturgy of liberalism, remember when they said, hey, marijuana shops, those are essential services, but going to church, absolutely not, no way. | |
| Yeah, no surprise. | |
| And for those who respond to this and say, well, Michael, look, come on, politicians can never change the culture because politics is downstream of culture. | |
| Look at East Germany. | |
| East Germany was run by the communists during the Cold War. | |
| West Germany was run by the West. | |
| In West Germany, you had religion. | |
| East Germany, you had state-imposed communism. | |
| Now here we are three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. | |
| West Germany continues to have a high degree of religious identification, Christian identification. | |
| East Germany continues to be an atheist place. | |
| The people identify as atheist. | |
| There you might say, culture was downstream from politics. | |
| Or really, what you're seeing is just that politics and culture are not so easily separated. | |
| And there is a political regime in the West broadly, but specifically in this country right now, that is very hostile to religion. | |
| There is a president right now who sues nuns because they won't pay for abortion drugs and contraception. | |
| And so it's no surprise that that's having an effect. | |
| We didn't cover it on this show, but there was this awful suicide bombing outside a cathedral on Palm Sunday in Indonesia. | |
| Palm Sunday is the longest liturgy of the year, so you had a lot of people who Hillary Clinton might call Easter worshipers, also known as Christians, who went to this cathedral and there was a suicide bombing. | |
| I don't think anyone's claimed responsibility. | |
| Muslim militants have committed these sorts of actions before in that part of the world, so that might be what's going on. | |
| Fortunately, I don't think very many people were killed. | |
| A lot of people were injured. | |
| I mention it because it's a reminder that as we are in Holy Week, as we approach Good Friday tomorrow and Easter Sunday after that, as we think back on our heritage as a Christian nation, no matter what the libs want to tell you, this is a Christian nation. | |
| It's a nation that is founded essentially on Christian principles and Christian ideas and even the practice of Christianity in varying ways. | |
| Christianity is the most persecuted religion on earth. | |
| Christians are the most persecuted religious group on earth. | |
| There was a survey to this effect that came out from Pew Research a few years ago. | |
| Contradicted by the left-wing narrative where we're told that Christianity is actually, they're the persecutors, those Christians. | |
| And there's such a thing as Christian nationalism that's rising up and we need to tamp it down. | |
| And Christians should not be able to follow their conscience and we should have the federal government suing nuns and that sort of thing. | |
| Christianity is the persecuted religion. | |
| There is no question about that. | |
| And you're seeing this more and more clearly as Christianity becomes a minority religion in America. | |
| You're going to see these attacks on the church become much clearer. | |
| If you think it's bad now with egghead public health officials shutting down churches arbitrarily and with the President of the United States supporting lawsuits against nuns, just wait. | |
| And see what happens if that number continues to shrink, as sadly, I'm afraid it probably will. | |
| There is a new religion of wokeness, of leftism, called whatever you want. | |
| It comes with a rigid racial caste system. | |
| You see this in Marin County, California. | |
| In Marin County right now, the supervisors there plan to contribute funds to a universal basic income program that will give just a blank check to people to test out and see how UBI works. | |
| This was something that was pushed in the Democratic primaries in 2020 by Andrew Yang. | |
| However, this UBI system is not going to be you. | |
| The universal part of universal basic income is going to be taken out. | |
| This program is going to be restricted to people on the basis of race and sex. | |
| Only non-white women are eligible. | |
| So tax dollars are going to be put into a fund, and then these supervisors are going to distribute those tax dollars only to non-white women. | |
| And they're going to call it universal basic income because they think that the only people who are entitled to these sorts of things, universally speaking, are the specific group of women. | |
| They'll spend $3 million to provide $1,000 to 125 low-income women each month, specifically on the basis of their race. | |
| The women must also have a child who's under 18 years old. | |
| And now they're getting some pushback for that and they say, no, we just want the money to go where it's most needed. | |
| And black women statistically are poorer than white women and so we're going to give it to the black women. | |
| If the point of the plan is to give it the money where it is most needed financially, why don't you just give it to the poor women? | |
| Well, no, because black women are poorer than white women. | |
| Right, but there are some black women who are wealthier than some white women, so if the whole point is a financial one, then just give it to the white women, or just give it to the poor white women, and the poor black women, and the poor Hispanic women, and whoever else on the basis of finances. | |
| This shows you this conflict that we have right now, which is right now, Most racial discrimination is prohibited by law. | |
| There is one carve-out, which is affirmative action, the idea that black and Hispanic applicants to college and jobs get legal privileges, and that white and Asian applicants to college and jobs have a legally protected disadvantage on the basis of their race, and that's just a weird carve-out in our law. | |
| But generally speaking, we do not permit racial discrimination in our law. | |
| Increasingly, leftist politicians want to enact racial discrimination against whites and Asians and for black people and Hispanic people. | |
| And you're seeing most clearly in laws like this. | |
| But there are other sorts of laws being proposed. | |
| But they're not able to do that yet because the law remains what it is. | |
| So they're trying to pretend that, no, it's really about economics. | |
| It's really about finances. | |
| It's really socio this. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| They're just trying to impose a racial caste system. | |
| And that is very, very bad. | |
| Speaking of race-hustling politicians, Kamala Harris has now been put in charge of the border crisis. | |
| President Joe Biden has said he's putting his vice president in charge of it. | |
| And yet Kamala Harris was asked about this and she said she has no plans to visit the border right now. | |
| What's going on? | |
| What's going on is a stroke of political brilliance from Joe Biden. | |
| It's politically brilliant, but it's often done. | |
| Which is, when a president is faced with a really, really tough issue that has no political upside for them, whatever happens, they give the issue to the vice president. | |
| So this is actually, it's not just a party line thing. | |
| Donald Trump did this to Mike Pence. | |
| When the coronavirus hit, and when the public health regime and many Democrats had basically put Donald Trump in this corner, Anything he did, if he embraced the masks and the lockdowns and really did a good job and kept those infection and death numbers down, then he would be accused by his own people of upending the Constitution and overreacting and falling for the trap. | |
| Sort of the criticism that I made at the time. | |
| But if he ignored the advice of the experts... | |
| Any death from the virus would be put at his feet, and so he would also have difficulty in re-election. | |
| Anything he did was a problem, so what did he do? | |
| He said, Mike Pence, you are leading the coronavirus task force. | |
| It's the same thing here with immigration. | |
| Anything Biden does is a loss for him. | |
| If he enforces the law and actually ships these foreign nationals back to their countries, his own base will turn on him. | |
| The broader public He supports enforcing our immigration laws, but the Democratic base opposes enforcing our immigration laws. | |
| So that looks bad for him. | |
| Yet, if Joe Biden says, okay, surge, come to the border, sort of some things he said during the primaries to win over Democratic base voters. | |
| If he starts saying that, borders wide open, come on through, he's going to lose support among the majority of Americans, according to public opinion surveys. | |
| So there's just nothing he can do here. | |
| So Kamala Harris gets it. | |
| Kamala, you're now in charge of the border. | |
| Okay. | |
| Kamala Harris is a crafty politician too. | |
| She knows that if she goes to the border and she's identified in photographs and film with this, with this crisis, her political career is going to take a big hit. | |
| So she's saying, yes, I'm dealing with it diplomatically here from the White House and don't worry, I'm in charge, but don't hold me too responsible for it. | |
| It's a classic political maneuver. | |
| And they're both playing it pretty well right now, but the crisis is getting worse and worse and worse. | |
| At a certain point, you think something's got to give. | |
| Speaking of clever politicians, remember Andrew Cuomo? | |
| Remember that guy? | |
| Andrew Cuomo. | |
| He was going to be impeached, or he was going to resign, or he... | |
| But I told you... | |
| Weeks and weeks ago, I said, do not count this guy out. | |
| This is a clever politician. | |
| He's a bulldog. | |
| He's been in New York state politics since he was in diapers. | |
| And this guy is going to hold on until the very end. | |
| Everyone said, he's done. | |
| He'll resign within days. | |
| I said, I don't think he's going to resign within days. | |
| Hard to see how he holds on. | |
| I know it's a really tough scandal, but... | |
| Cuomo is holding on. | |
| And so what he's doing right now is not addressing the contrived sex scandal that he like winked at his secretary or something. | |
| He's not addressing the real scandal, which is that he sent sick people to nursing homes, needlessly killing thousands of elderly New Yorkers. | |
| Then he knew about that and then he covered it up because he didn't want a federal investigation into him. | |
| He is talking about marijuana and a bunch of big dopes are falling for it. | |
| Cuomo is legalizing pot in New York, recreational marijuana for people over the age of 21. | |
| He's setting up a licensing process for the delivery of pot to potheads, and he's allowing New Yorkers to grow up to three mature and three immature plants for personal use. | |
| I think all marijuana plants are immature, if you ask me. | |
| Think about that. | |
| The bill was passed by both the Democrat-led Senate and Assembly, and Cuomo's all for it. | |
| Cuomo says, this is a historic day in New York, one that rights the wrongs of the past by putting an end to harsh prison sentences, embraces an industry that will grow the Empire State's economy, and prioritizes marginalized communities to Prioritizes marginalized communities so those that have suffered the most will be the first to reap the benefits. | |
| Isn't this kind of offensive to say like, listen, legalizing marijuana, legalizing drugs is really helpful to black people because everyone knows black people love drugs. | |
| Black people just naturally, biologically, according to Andrew Cuomo, have a predilection for doing drugs and just wasting their day puffing on the devil's lettuce. | |
| And so as a matter of racial justice, We need to let people waste their time puffing on that sin spinach. | |
| Pretty offensive stuff, but what a silly, silly distraction. | |
| First of all, I love the idea that the marijuana industry is somehow, they're the good guys. | |
| I just spoke with my friend Maddie Kearns from National Review about this. | |
| She has a great piece, cover story in The Spectator, out right now, which you should listen to, or read rather, called Big Dope. | |
| You should also listen to the interview, where she points out These are bad guys. | |
| If you think big tobacco is bad, big dope is just as bad. | |
| It's bad for your health. | |
| These guys are trying to downplay the health risks of smoking pot, which has all the same health risks as smoking cigarettes, all the tar, all the fear of diseases. | |
| And by the way, some other diseases thrown onto it because it messes with your head. | |
| So why are we rooting for these guys? | |
| I mean, I understand there is some argument for decriminalizing marijuana. | |
| I'm not convinced by that argument. | |
| But I understand there's some argument for it. | |
| But the argument is not that this is a matter of right, that everyone needs to be able to smoke pot in the marijuana industry. | |
| They're the good guys. | |
| Give me a break. | |
| He's doing it, of course, to distract from his actual political scandals. | |
| Speaking of things that only make sense if you have been puffing on the Jamaican oregano, Demi Lovato, who I don't really know who she is. | |
| I think she's a singer or an actress. | |
| She went on Joe Rogan's podcast to describe Sex and gender, the only thing that we're talking about these days, because the left has taken away our higher faculties of reason. | |
| We no longer debate important matters, or rather eternal matters, or rather higher matters. | |
| We're just talking about our loins and the longings of our loins. | |
| So Demi Lovato says that she's fluid now. | |
| She's really fluid. | |
| She's no longer... | |
| I don't know. | |
| She's no longer solid. | |
| She's fluid. | |
| And so she's actually a pansexual. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| I'm so fluid now. | |
| And a part of the reason why I am so fluid is because I... Fluid. | |
| You're fluid. | |
| What do you mean, fluid? | |
| Well, like you like girls or boys? | |
| Oh, I like anything, really. | |
| Isn't that so good? | |
| She's really open. | |
| I don't mean to knock on Demi Lovato. | |
| She's representative of a broader culture. | |
| It's good to be open. | |
| It's bad to be closed. | |
| It's good to just have your loins titillated by anything. | |
| And it's bad to have preferences. | |
| It's bad to say some things are good, some things are bad, some things are right, some things are wrong. | |
| So Demi Lovato is sexually attracted to anything. | |
| So she's sexually attracted to kids, right? | |
| Because kids are within the subset of anything. | |
| And she's fluid and she's open. | |
| And she's attracted to animals, right? | |
| Sexually. | |
| Because she's attracted to anything. | |
| She's a pansexual. | |
| She's attracted to anything. | |
| She's attracted to my leftist years tumbler, right? | |
| It's in the, no. | |
| I guess the leftist years tumbler, much, much less objectionable than the kids or the animals. | |
| No. | |
| I bet if I asked her this right now, I said, you're attracted to kids and animals? | |
| She'd say, no, oh my gosh, no, what are you talking, you sicko, what are you talking about? | |
| Oh, okay, so then you're not attracted, you're not totally fluid. | |
| Some things are solid. | |
| There are some guard reels here. | |
| You're not totally open. | |
| You're somewhat closed-minded, as you should be. | |
| It is good to be somewhat closed-minded. | |
| Skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction. | |
| To quote William F. Buckley Jr., quoting a prominent liberal in God and Man at Yale. | |
| Some people are so open-minded that their brains fall out. | |
| Fluid. | |
| Open. | |
| We can't know anything. | |
| We're just, we're everything, man. | |
| You know, it's just kind of whatever. | |
| Man, I gotta get to New York, don't I? No. | |
| No, I don't think so. | |
| We are in a moment where our culture wants to deny that we can say anything. | |
| And the right has fallen for this worse than the left has. | |
| At least the left continues to pursue their own political agenda. | |
| They at least continue to exert their will, if not their reason. | |
| But we on the right, we've fallen for it. | |
| We've said, well, we can't... | |
| Look, if I say one thing's good, then you might say another thing's good. | |
| And that's just values and preferences, man. | |
| And we can't know anything for sure, and we can't use our reason. | |
| No, guys, put down the bong. | |
| Okay? | |
| Recognize that there is such a thing as truth. | |
| Goodness, justice, beauty. | |
| We can kind of know these things. | |
| And when we can kind of know these things, we can govern ourselves. | |
| We used to know that in America, but I don't know. | |
| Maybe we're all suffering a cultural short-term memory loss or something. | |
| Maybe we've had a few too many rips. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| See you tomorrow. | |
| See you 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, President Biden has a brilliant new plan that will heal the economy. | |
| AOC has some incisive thoughts on the border crisis. | |
| And Dr. | |
| Jill Biden, the greatest doctor in American history, speaks Spanish beautifully. | |
| April Fools. | |
| That's today on the Ben Shapiro Show. |