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April 30, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
50:18
Ep. 754 - The Most Popular President Ever

Ratings crater for Biden’s fake SOTU, a Cuban refugee claims the commies have already conquered America, and Ted Cruz pressures squishy Republicans to put their money where their mouths are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The ratings are in and nobody watched Joe Biden's joint address to Congress the other night.
It wasn't quite nobody.
The ratings were not quite as low as the Oscar ratings, but they had almost the exact same decline year over year.
So now that we have the numbers of actual viewers, Biden's joint session drew 22.6 million viewers.
That's across seven major networks.
That is a drop of 47% from the 43 million who tuned into President Trump's first speech to a joint session across those same networks.
47% down in the ratings from Trump to Biden.
Because Joe Biden, you'll recall, is the most popular president in U.S. history with the most votes and the greatest and everybody just loves him so much.
Kind of weird how the numbers don't show it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Old Schooled, who says the one thing that the presidential address had going for it was that they had better actors than the Oscars did.
That is not fair.
Anthony Hopkins, one of the great living actors, he won the Academy Award.
But he did have the good sense not to show up, so I suppose you're right.
The comparisons between the Oscars and the joint session, very, very profound.
And I think it gets to the acting, the theater that we're all seeing play out in front of us in terms of our government.
And the difference between, as we talked about yesterday, the way the government really works and the way the Pretty big gap between those two.
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The most popular president in U.S. history.
I think he got...
500 zillion votes, Joe Biden.
People just love that guy.
And that is why they don't tune in to watch him speak.
That is why they don't seem to care what he's doing.
That is why he doesn't even seem like an entity.
He seems like the absence of an entity.
Because the Democrats are so popular.
That's why they've got to kick you off of the internet if you ever question any of their plans or any of their claims, because of how popular and in control they are.
They're so popular, they're so in control of the narrative, they're so in control of the science, that they need to force you to wear 17,000 masks, and if you don't, they're going to throw you off of your airplane, or they're going to throw you out of a business, or they're not going to let you travel, and they're not going to let you do anything, because of how...
How in control they are.
And by the way, if you want to pass an election integrity bill in Georgia, they are going to pull all of their woke corporate money out, and then the Congress is going to try to steal the power to conduct elections from the states.
You know, because of how popular they are.
Right?
Right?
You know, in New York, we've just had the reapportionment of congressional districts.
New York just lost a congressional seat.
You know, because of how popular their policies are and how everyone's flocking to New York and flocking to California.
Or is it the opposite?
Is it that everyone is fleeing those places with their terrible governments and coming here?
New York is a great place, just in terms of the location, the history of New York, greatest city, greatest state in the world.
But I can't live there anymore.
Many people can't live there anymore.
People are leaving that place, going to other places.
Same thing with California.
Natural beauty cannot be matched in California.
But people are fleeing California in droves and moving to places that maybe don't have quite the same natural beauty, but they've got freedom and normal people and the traditional American way of life.
And that's what we want.
New York lost its congressional seat.
By 89 people.
You know, they do the census, they figure out how many people there are, then they apportion the congressional seats.
They came up 89 people short.
Bill McMorris at the Washington Free Beacon tweeted out an interesting observation about this.
If New York banned abortion for just seven hours and 25 minutes in 2019, it would still have its congressional seat.
It's an amazing thing to think about.
When you consider the issue of abortion, which New York celebrates, you'll remember when Andrew Kovid decided to sign the new abortion law that allows people to kill their babies up until the moment of birth.
He said, this is so wonderful.
We're going to light the Freedom Tower up in pink to celebrate all the girls we're going to kill now through abortion.
If they had had a slightly less bloodthirsty view of abortion, a slightly less celebratory view, for 7 hours and 25 minutes, they would still have their congressional seat.
Because we think about these as separate, there's women's reproductive health and abortion, and then there's the people.
No, the people got into this world by being born, and so if they're not born, you don't get the people.
There are real effects to these policies.
Although sometimes it's a little bit delayed.
The conservative consolation is that reality will reassert itself to some degree in the end.
That is the one thing we can hope for.
It might take a very long time.
We might have to work very hard to do it.
But eventually there is a reassertion of reality.
You're seeing this now, even with the devout Catholic Joe Biden.
Joe Biden positions himself as a devout Catholic.
He fundamentally disagrees with the church's teaching and disobeys the church's teaching on very important matters, notably life, which according to Pope St. John Paul II, is not just one issue among many.
It's not like, well, look, I agree with the church on tax cuts, but I disagree with the church on abortion and okay, I guess we'll take it or leave it.
No, life is not one issue among many is the prerequisite for all of the other rights.
Joe Biden fundamentally opposed with that.
That is not permissible.
That's why he was denied communion on the campaign trail a couple years ago.
Now the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops is considering holding Joe Biden to account, threatening to withhold the Eucharist.
That is to excommunicate him, prevent him from receiving communion.
This is a very good thing.
This is not simply a punishment to attack Joe Biden.
This is an act of love.
The church's teaching is that if you receive the Eucharist in a state of grave mortal sin, you are eating your own damnation.
It is an act of love and compassion by the church, by the bishops, to withhold communion from Joe Biden until he gets his life in order and gets back in line.
Sometimes the bishops go a little kooky.
Sometimes the bishops don't do their job.
Sometimes the bishops don't have a spine.
I spoke to a priest once after I released my book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats.
I'm sorry, I really got confused here because usually when I talk about my book, I mention my upcoming book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
But now I'm referring to my previous book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide.
I showed that to a priest once.
He said, oh, I think I might steal the idea and make my own book, The Wisdom of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops.
But here in the end, the faith is impelling them.
To hold the line on life.
Hopefully we can pray that Joe Biden is held on that point.
Because in other derivations, other churches and ecclesiastical communities that have broken away, you're not seeing that.
There's a story out now that a Southern Baptist is criticizing a Methodist church because they've got a cross-dressing pastor.
That's a very strange thing.
Because if you don't have that rock, if you don't have that grounding in reality, if you don't have that respect for objective truth, Then you're going to fall away into very kooky things.
And it's why you're seeing a discrepancy right now between what the American political regime is telling us about how they're supposed to behave and about the nature of the government and the way that things really are.
Because they have explicitly in their ideology denied objective reality.
The left for decades and decades now has talked about how all we need to do is construct narratives.
Everything is words, words, words, words.
And if we can redefine the words, we can redefine reality.
What we're seeing is just peeking through.
That's not quite true.
Joe Biden, the most popular president ever.
Well, how come no one pays attention to anything he says?
Oh, the policies of the Democrats are so popular, everyone loves them.
How come people are fleeing their states?
Men really can be women.
Well, how come so many people just don't think that's so?
We've mentioned this issue, the gender issue, quite a lot on this show because while it afflicts only a very small number of people as a psychological matter, though increasingly so because it's a social contagion, especially among younger people, but the reason that we talk about it is because...
The left is spending a lot of time and energy and money on this issue, and the reason they're doing that is because if they can redefine nature, if they can liberate themselves even from the bonds of nature, then there is no limit to their political project.
And that has always been the point, is to totally revolutionize society.
So now they're no longer even arguing that adults should be able to mutilate themselves to better accord with their delusions.
They're now saying that we should do this to children as well.
And when the Republicans have pushed back and said, no, we're not going to do that.
Very popular laws pushed by Republicans to say, you can't castrate your kids.
That's child abuse.
We're not going to let you do it.
Well, what is the left saying?
If you don't permit that, then you are abusing children.
You're killing children.
Ellen Page now goes by Elliot Page.
This actress says, the backlash right now is so intense, but the rhetoric coming from anti-trans activists and anti-LGBTQ activists...
Namely, people who have two eyes and recognize that men are not women.
It's devastating.
These bills are going to be responsible for the death of children.
It's that simple.
Okay.
I want to take this argument on head-on because I think very often people will write in.
From the left and they'll say, you just don't understand this issue, Michael.
You're strawmanning this issue.
Sure, men and women are different, but some people have this awful affliction and if you don't indulge their fantasies, then you're killing them because they're going to be depressed and suicidal.
What about anorexics?
What about people who are dangerously thin but believe that they are fat?
That's their truth.
That's their self-perception.
That's their identity.
They're fat people trapped inside of thin people's bodies, right?
And if we don't indulge their delusion, they're going to be very sad and depressed and upset.
You're literally killing them if you don't allow them to destroy their bodies.
What's the difference?
They're both body dysmorphic disorders.
This is actually what Paul McHugh, the doctor who helped to pioneer the transgender surgery at Johns Hopkins University, which was the institution that pioneered the gender ideology, this is what he concluded in the 70s.
He said, the surgery doesn't really do anything to help people.
It doesn't necessarily hurt, but it doesn't...
As a psychological matter, it obviously hurts their physicality, but it doesn't help them, so he stopped doing it.
You know who else was at Johns Hopkins University?
Dr.
John Money, a sick pervert who was totally bought in on gender identity theory and destroyed a young boy's life because he, as a little baby, mutilated the boy's genitals to make him look more like a girl and conducted heinous experiments on him.
And both he and his brother developed horrible...
Disorders and ultimately both killed themselves on the altar, sacrificed on the altar of this insane theory.
I discuss this at great length, actually, in my upcoming book.
What's it called?
Speechless.
Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
Available now for pre-order.
Horrible, horrible things perpetrated in this name on a false sense of compassion.
There is nothing compassionate about indulging the anorexic's delusions.
And no amount of emotional manipulation will convince me that it is.
There's another argument on the gender theory, which is this.
Yes, men and women are different.
And yeah, that's not going to change reality, but these men who think they're women, they're just caught in this condition and there's no way out of it.
And so it's better for them, it's much better for them, if they can mutilate their bodies to look more like the other sex before puberty sets in.
That's the argument.
The actual strong argument for castrating kids Relatively strong argument for castrating kids is that if you allow puberty to set in, it's going to be very difficult to mutilate their bodies to look more like the other sex.
So you actually have to do it before they're grown up, before they have developed their faculties of reason totally.
Otherwise, they're going to miss the chance and you're going to be responsible.
You bigoted, closed-minded conservatives, you're going to be responsible for killing people later on because you wouldn't mutilate them when they were kids.
I see the quasi-logic of that argument.
Parents make decisions for kids.
And they make some decisions for kids because the kids are not old enough to make those decisions themselves.
And so the parents need to decide to castrate the kids.
But we're not just talking about whether the kid is going to eat broccoli or Cheetos for dinner.
We're not just talking about is the kid going to learn violin or guitar.
We're not just talking about is he going to play football or baseball.
We are talking about sexual decisions for children.
And we are talking about permanent sexual decisions for children.
And it raises this question.
Someone wrote in to me.
Caitlin Burns, who's written for Vox and MSNBC, says, By 18, the permanent effects of natal puberty have set in, so the state has effectively made decisions about their body without giving adolescents any choice at all.
So the children need to have choice about sexual decisions and permanent sexual decisions of that.
But they're children.
They don't have free choice.
If this woman's argument, or man, I don't know.
I think there might be a transgender issue in this case.
I don't know much about this person.
But if this argument is correct, why do we have age of consent laws?
Why?
What's the point of an age of consent law?
The argument for an age of consent law is that kids are too young to make any sexual decisions, much less permanent ones.
If we are now saying that children have the right to mutilate their genitals, castrate themselves...
Surely you would have to abolish age of consent laws.
So I pointed this out.
This is a very basic argument.
And of course, the disingenuous left, what do they do?
Whenever you make a point like this, they say, well, you stop sexualizing children.
You're trying to get rid of age of consent laws.
No, they don't really think that.
They're just trying to get a cheap shot in.
No, quite the opposite.
I'm trying to make it illegal to have these surgeries.
Because this is extraordinarily disordered and it's child abuse.
And I don't think that children have free agency, and I don't think that we should sexualize children in the way that the left has done in a systematic way for decades, beginning with the bizarre fantasies of Wilhelm Reich, moving on to the sick child sexual experiments of Dr.
John Money, who was that doctor at Johns Hopkins, who would have these two brothers simulate sex, strip, take photos of it, all in the name of some sort of perverted science— The sexualization of children that we saw in the early essays of Bernie Sanders in alternative newspapers in Vermont, who would talk about how we need children to become accustomed to their sexuality and experiment with one another.
Seriously, it's in there.
I mention it in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
These are two totally different visions.
And there's no compromise between those things.
And I think we're beginning to see, as the leftist narrative gets so insane, that you've got left-wingers arguing for the total sexualization of children to make permanent sexual decisions.
And the vast majority of people who look at that and say, man, whatever that is, I'm out.
Whatever that is, I don't want it.
You're seeing that breakdown now.
How did we get this far?
How on earth...
Did the country get to the point that we are seriously having this debate?
There is a Cuban refugee spoke at the GOP convention this past year who has come out and he's said in a recent interview that the reason for this and he doesn't want to sound hyperbolic but he knows a thing or two about the subject is that America has already swallowed communism's poison pill.
Take a listen.
As we just heard at your RNC convention, you had talked about how people in Cuba had swallowed the communist poison pill.
Have Americans swallowed the communist poison pill?
Not only they have swallowed it, they're digesting it.
Listen to the media.
They're no longer objective.
You can tell how much they hate this country.
Look at our academia.
Our kids are not being...
They're indoctrinated.
They're taught that America is a bad country, that with a bunch of racists, that we're bad people and we have to pay back.
If this country was racist, I wouldn't be here.
If this country was a racist country, most of us wouldn't be here because even some people in your family came from another country.
So he's speaking just from this personal experience where he says, I've seen what's happened to my old country, and now I'm seeing what's happening here.
There is a lot to be said for this.
You know, the left always says, oh, whenever you talk about Marxism or communism, you crazy right-wingers, you're just conspiracy theorists, you've got a tinfoil hat on.
No, no, of course not.
Marxism has long festered in this country, in various places, in higher education, in our institutions.
Whitaker Chambers, in that excellent book Witness, helped make Reagan into a conservative.
He said that communism is the great alternative faith of mankind, which began in the Garden of Eden when the serpent said, ye shall be as gods.
When we're talking about upending the whole system, abolish the police, which is really just a euphemism for destroying the entire justice system.
The police are the physical representations of the system of law and order and justice.
So when you abolish the police, what you're really saying is abolish the whole system.
And the left says the system is rotten to the core.
The whole country was founded to preserve slavery.
That's Nicole Hannah-Jones from the New York Times, the 1619 Project.
So you've got to get rid of the whole thing.
But we can't just even liberate ourselves from politics and tradition and society in our country.
We have to liberate ourselves from nature.
And if a little boy wants to be a little girl, we have it in our power.
We shall be his gods.
We will chop up that kid's genitals to make him look like a girl.
That's the actual argument being made by these people.
And the persuasive aspect of that argument is that we have total agency.
We want to be totally in control.
We want to be totally free.
Even a lot of right-wingers buy into that kind of idea.
But it's based on a false anthropology.
It's based on a false understanding of human nature that we're born into this world primarily with rights and entitlement rather than primarily with obligation and duty and gratitude for our forebears.
It's based on the false anthropology that we own our bodies and we can do whatever we want.
True freedom is being able to mutilate yourself or take a bunch of drugs or pursue any sort of vice you want.
The idea that true liberty is licentiousness.
Our founding fathers knew the opposite was true.
But this poisonous idea has infected our institutions.
Do not forget that the father of the new left, one of the most famous Marxist philosophers in the last hundred years, worked for the CIA or worked rather for the precursor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services.
His name was Herbert Marcuse.
Herbert Marcuse came to fame during the rise of critical theory in the Frankfurt School.
Critical theory is a very simple theory.
The theory is to criticize, but it followed from Marx's proclamation that we ought to pursue the ruthless criticism of all that exists.
It's a brilliant academic theory because what it involves is opening up this fallen world, which is obviously rife to criticism, to this ruthless assault.
That ultimately can deconstruct society.
Marcuse is the architect of political correctness in many ways.
He wrote a very famous essay in the 60s called Repressive Tolerance about how true tolerance means you've got to shut down conservatives and censor them and you've got to encourage left-wing voices.
Marcuse, a revolutionary in society, and Marcuse worked For the precursor to the CIA, he worked for the federal government, not just during World War II, which makes some sense because we were teaming up with Joseph Stalin to fight the Nazis, but even after World War II. Whitaker Chambers, details at length about how explicit communists who were doing work on behalf of the Soviet Union were working at very high levels of the State Department.
Alger Hiss, most notably.
One of the only politicians who actually believed Whitaker Chambers and went after Alger Hiss, Richard Nixon, and the left never forgave him for it.
And the institutions would not allow him to remain in power for very long.
Well, today we are seeing the effects of long-festering poisonous ideologies at our government institutions, most notably the CIA. I woke up today and I saw that the CIA had tweeted something.
Should the nation's most famous spy agency be tweeting in general?
Probably not.
But it got worse.
It wasn't just that they sent out a tweet.
It was what they tweeted.
There was no substantive difference between the video that the CIA tweeted this morning and the most ridiculous diversity and inclusion training manual from the most crazy leftist at the wokest corporate boardroom or university.
Take a listen.
I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36, I refused to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.
I am tired of feeling like I'm supposed to apologize for the space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance.
I am proud of me.
Full stop.
My parents left everything they knew and loved to expose me to opportunities they never had.
Because of them, I stand here today a proud first-generation Latina and officer at CIA. I'm so glad to hear that our spies are no longer suffering from imposter syndrome.
That's good.
Could you imagine if those spies felt like imposters?
Oh, no, that would be terrible for our espionage apparatus.
The left, especially, has long made an argument to disband the CIA, because they'll say, oh, you know, the CIA put down communist revolutions in Latin America, and it propped up strong men in certain places that advanced our interests, and we need to...
None of that, I find, persuasive at all.
The CIA has done.
There have been plenty of CIA agents and operatives who have done excellent work over the years.
After watching that video, I am prepared to disband the CIA. Let's do it.
Clearly, this organization has outlived its usefulness.
It's always had some dodgy connections, going back at least to Marcuse, but it's enough.
It's enough.
When the Central Intelligence Agency, which has a lot of power in this country, which exerts a lot of influence, even over electoral politics, as we saw with the interference that they engaged in with the Trump administration, names like Eric Charimella come to mind. as we saw with the interference that they engaged in The CIA has a lot of power.
They've got a lot of power in the shadows and they have now adopted, as they told us this morning, a very, very radical ideology, the ideology of radical liberation, the ideology that posits that there is such a thing as a patriarchy, the ideology that posits that there is such a thing as a patriarchy, which needs to be overthrown, an ideology which posits that people ought to embrace pride, the queen of
now considered the greatest virtue according to the left, the ideology that says that we must embrace our racial identity and sexual identity as the most important aspects of who we are.
Absolute poison for this country.
That is now being pushed, not even secretly, by one of our nation's most secret agencies.
It's being pushed right out in the open.
A total takeover.
Marcuse must be giddy.
He must be dancing from the afterlife as he looks up at what is happening here at the CIA and in the United States.
All of the institutions have been infected by this thing.
There is a professor, a video just leaked, a professor at Cypress College in Southern California, berating a student during fake Zoom school because the student suggested that the cops are heroes.
I think cops are heroes and they have to have a difficult job, but we have to have that fine life.
All of them?
I mean, I'd say a good majority of them.
You have bad people in every business and every part.
A lot of police officers have committed atrocious crimes and have gotten away with it and have never been convicted of any of it.
And I think for the person who has family members, who are police officers?
Yes, I understand.
And this is what I believe.
This is my opinion.
And this is, you know, not popular to say, but I do support our police.
We have bad people, and the people that do bad things should be brought to justice.
I agree with that.
But I think that...
Say it again.
They haven't.
Well, I agree with you on that point of they should, right?
So what is your bottom line point?
You're saying police officers should be revered, viewed as heroes, right?
They go long on TV shows with children.
I think they are heroes in a sense because they come to your need and they come and help you.
What can I vote for this kid for?
This is terrific stuff because he's suffering with great patience, which is a virtue, through this absolutely empty-headed professor's diatribe against the police.
And what's her argument?
She says, the police, some police have done bad things and they've gotten away with it.
True.
You know who else has done bad things and gotten away with it?
Criminals.
Criminals have done that.
And yet, what the left does now is castigates all police and assumes that whenever police use force of any kind, that that's evil and wrong.
And what do they do?
They exalt criminals.
They just spent a year exalting criminals.
Whenever a criminal does anything, it's because the system made them do it.
It's really because the cops made them do it, probably.
Totally upside down.
That's what's being taught.
That's indoctrination, but education indoctrinates.
They're synonyms.
Education is coercive.
It tells people what to think.
That is what is being taught.
That is what's being taught at the universities, at the colleges.
That's what's being pushed in our government agencies.
That's what's being pushed in corporate boardrooms.
It's the whole apparatus here.
It's so crazy on this racial theory that Joy Behar...
A very white woman just lectured Senator Tim Scott on The View because he apparently doesn't understand systemic racism.
Tim Scott, he does not seem to understand, and a lot of them don't seem to understand, the difference between a racist country and systemic racism.
They don't seem to get the difference.
Yes, maybe it's not a racist country.
Maybe Americans The majority are not racist, but we live in a country with systemic racism.
We discussed it this week already about housing and about education and all of the things that are important to people.
And the fact that Tim Scott cannot acknowledge this.
It's appalling.
How can you go out there and say that when you just said two minutes ago that you were the object and the victim of discrimination?
And then he says that this is not a racist country.
At least acknowledge that there is systemic racism.
That's what I wanted to hear from him, and he didn't say it.
I'm not saying it's a racist country, but at least acknowledge it's a racist country.
What Joy Behar is doing right here is double-think.
She's espousing two contradictory ideas at the same time, which George Orwell described beautifully in 1984.
She's saying the country isn't racist, sure, that's fine, but the system is racist.
So the American, American, not racist.
The American system is racist.
If the system is racist, then the thing is racist.
Then the thing that the system describes is also racist.
They're the same thing.
It's like when the left says there's a difference between sex and gender.
Okay.
What's the difference?
Sex is biological and gender socially constructed.
Okay.
Well, if it's socially constructed and people have a disagreement between the two, let's just reconstruct that because it's all social.
Well, no, it's got a biological basis.
Okay.
So gender has got a biological basis.
Now it sounds a lot like sex and they say, wow, you just don't get it.
You're not smart enough.
No, I think the people who are thinking systematically about these things just recognize that you can't hold contradictory ideas at the same time and maintain your coherence.
Before we get to the mailbag, which is going to be great, I have to, I have to commend Senator Ted Cruz, not just because I host a podcast with him.
He had an excellent article in the Senator Cruz is turning away corporate PAC money.
He's made millions of dollars from corporate PACs over the years.
Corporations donate to all sorts of candidates.
He is now saying that the GOP has got to recognize that a real threat in this country comes from the corporations.
It's not just the big government versus the private sector.
The corporations are some of the institutions that have gone totally poisonous.
And in many ways, they're leading the cultural charge.
Cruz is saying, I'm not taking any more money from them, and I encourage all other Republicans to do it, too.
Read the article, send it around, and please help that pressure campaign.
The GOP has got to stop shilling for these woke corporations that hate our way of life and want to destroy our American political tradition.
By the way, as I'm sure you all know, The Daily Wire has been growing like crazy.
Not only did we move the whole company across the country, we also released our first feature film, We struck up a movie deal with Gina Carano.
We launched a new talk show hosted by Candace Owens.
All of that within just the past six months.
I love Nashville.
I'm so glad that I'm here now.
My only regret, we didn't come sooner.
All of us here at The Daily Wire would like to express our gratitude to you, the audience.
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Welcome back to my absolute favorite time of the week, the mailbag.
First question up from Eric.
Good day, Michael.
I have a relationship question for you.
My girlfriend and I live together in Toronto and she would like to go visit her grandparents.
I have no problem with her doing this because I know what her family means to her and I like her family as well.
The issue is that her grandparents are COVID crazy and they would make my girlfriend and I quarantine for two weeks, stopping us from exercising and picking up our own groceries.
They even think we should double mask outside.
My girlfriend and I had a disagreement regarding whether I will go along with that.
With what they want us to do.
I'm quite tired of being a pushover, and I would like to stand up for myself if someone wants to alter my life in a way that I think is unjustified.
I understand that I'm the one being harsh in this situation.
I haven't made up my mind.
I'm just trying to figure out what is the least bad decision.
Thank you so much and love the show.
I sympathize with you.
However, you have put yourself in a very weak position.
You have left yourself open to your girlfriend's family telling you what to do because you are not married to your girlfriend.
That's the problem.
You're living with your girlfriend.
A lot of people do that these days.
It's a separate issue.
But If you live with your girlfriend, but you are not married to your girlfriend, then in some ways you get the benefits of being married, but in some ways you don't.
One of the benefits of being married is that you have the stature to be the head of your household and to call the shots within reason.
But if you're not married, you don't have that stature and you don't have any credibility when you're trying to Tell your wife's family that you're going to run your own family and you're going to, you know, decide how best to react to these things.
So my first advice to you is get married.
If you're already living together, just get married and then you'll have a lot better stature and you will avoid these sorts of pitfalls.
In the meantime, Some of it depends, I suppose, just from if you're thinking about the risk calculation here.
Have your girlfriend's grandparents gotten vaccinated?
Have you guys gotten vaccinated?
I'm with Joe Rogan on this.
I'm not clamoring out to go get the vaccine if I'm a young, healthy person.
Likewise, I don't think you're going to grow a tail and a third eye.
These are just risk calculations you're making.
I would defer, even if I were married, I would try to come to a compromise that is patient and reverent toward your girlfriend's grandparents because they're not going to be around forever and you don't want to create a situation where your girlfriend doesn't get to see your grandparents.
I wouldn't totally roll over, but the issue is You've left yourself in the position to be a pushover because you have not stepped up to actually lead your household by getting married before you move in.
So I'm not saying you're the only guy to do this.
Basically, everyone does this these days, but you can fix the problem by stepping up and actually leading your household.
From Matthew.
First of all, love the show.
Thank you.
Second, what led you to Christianity?
And if you were able to elaborate on Catholicism, keep up the good work and fight the good fight.
It's a five-year story, but I'll try to compact that.
Because I mentioned this on the Tim Pool show the other night, and some people writing in said, I wish you had spoken about this at greater length.
I was an atheist for about ten years, but this started to crack down by the end.
I was exposed to the arguments for the existence of God and the quasi-arguments against the existence of God.
I actually don't think there really are arguments against the existence of God.
I was first introduced to the ontological argument.
I later encountered other arguments for the existence of God.
They are persuasive.
They simply are persuasive.
We can go through those arguments.
I would just recommend going through the ontological argument.
I really get a kick out of it.
Some people don't find it convincing.
The argument is basically God is the greatest It's the maximally great being by definition.
It's better to exist than not to exist.
Therefore, God must exist.
It's more complicated and persuasive than that, but that's the gist of it.
Some people don't find that persuasive.
There are many other good arguments for God, notably the ones described by St.
Thomas Aquinas.
Arguments from cause, contingency, perfection.
The arguments are just simply better than the arguments against God.
The best one against God, I guess, is the problem of suffering and the problem of pain.
It's known as theodicy.
But suffering does not really make an argument one way or the other, right?
Suffering is a fact of the world, but actually I think you can make a stronger argument for the existence of God through suffering than against the existence of God, and notably for Christianity, which involves incarnation and atonement.
Okay.
Okay, so there's the existence of God.
What about Christianity?
You've got to deal seriously with the person of Christ.
And you can't just say, well, there are lots of different religions, you know.
Kind of.
But, first of all, there are the non-theistic religions, Hinduism and Buddhism.
But they don't really have a systematic theology, so that doesn't make quite as much sense.
Then you've got the three major theistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Judaism rejects the person of Christ.
So you've got to deal there with the person of Christ.
Is Christ who he says he is?
Islam is a heresy, a reading of Christianity that comes from other heresies that were going on at the time.
Muhammad actually very famously met with a heretical Christian monk before he launched the religion of Islam.
I don't mean any disrespect to Muslims when I say this is a Christian heresy, but...
That is the history of the development of that religion.
Now, you might say, well, but nevertheless, it's the true religion.
Okay, I'm just telling you where it comes from.
So, in any of those cases, when you're dealing with the theistic religions, you have to deal with this person of Christ.
And it just seems to me, as C.S. Lewis said, he's either got to be one of the three L's.
I'll even take it out further to a fourth L. He's got to be a liar, a lunatic, a legend, or the Lord.
Either he's a liar and he's not who he says he is, but then you have to account for the miracles, you have to account for the resurrection, which has 500 eyewitnesses, and you've got to account for the way that he speaks, which just doesn't seem like a liar.
And a liar to what end?
He ends up getting crucified.
He's either a lunatic, right?
He's just saying crazy things.
But again, how does he persuade all these people to follow him?
When you read what he says, does he sound like a lunatic to you?
Or does he sound actually like the only sane person in a lunatic world?
Or he is a legend.
Did he just not exist at all?
There have been some kooks who have tried to say that in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it just doesn't hold up.
The evidence for the existence of Christ exists.
And for what he did is just so good.
It's so much better than for basically any other figure of the era.
So I don't think that works.
Then you got to get to the Lord.
Is he the Lord?
It would seem that he is.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
Next question from Rob.
Sadly, my daughter was singing a Disney song tonight at dinner.
Jasmine's song in Aladdin.
Speechless.
Thankfully, I... Thankfully, I've already pre-ordered my signed copy of your upcoming Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available for pre-order for now.
Do we get a ding for that?
If I didn't...
I guess we...
I don't know.
I didn't...
That wasn't my plug, but that was a really...
That plug was so seamless, too.
I'm going to take notes on how to make a transition that seamless.
From Drew.
Hey, Michael.
My name is Drew.
I'm 26, and I watched the episode of Backstage and noticed that in the chamber, there are two symbols next to the flags called Foshies.
This is in the House of Representatives.
I didn't know what it was, so I looked it up.
And it sounds a whole lot like fascist symbolism.
Is there a good reason the United States has such a symbol in the Chamber of Congress?
Thanks.
Yes, the fascist is an ancient symbol that goes back to ancient Rome.
You see it in Greece.
You've seen it all throughout the history of many countries, including the United States.
Fascism takes this idea of the fascis, like a bundling up together, and creates a political ideology out of that.
But fascism is a modernist political ideology.
This is why sometimes when people call me a fascist, I like to point out that I'm far too reactionary for fascism.
I am way more conservative than the fascists are.
Because fascism, it's difficult to pin down.
George Orwell famously said that fascism Now only has the meaning of something not desirable.
Everyone calls everyone else a fascist.
But there is an essay about fascism written by Benito Mussolini, the founder of it, the Italian dictator, and Giovanni Gentile, who was the philosopher who helped him write that essay.
And what it basically boils down to is an atheist political ideology that worships the state.
The state comes above all other things.
And That's about as specific as you can get on what fascism is.
So it takes this idea of the bundling up of everybody and just describes that as the state.
In a way, sort of like what Joe Biden said the other day when he said, we the people are the government.
The government are the people.
There's no distinction between the two things.
But in America, we just don't believe that.
We have a great separation of powers between the federal government, the state governments, the people themselves.
And we also believe that government is circumscribed by God, which fascism would not recognize.
So It's, you know, like many ideologies, it takes some aspect of antiquity or some aspect of the tradition and blows it up out of proportion.
Like Chesterton said, he says that most heresy is not the promotion of vice over virtue, it's the promotion of one virtue to the exclusion of all the others.
From Paula, Michael, I never thought I would take issue with you on anything.
However, I disagree with you on how we look at those with gender dysphoria.
I completely disagree that we have, or I completely agree rather that we have only two sexes, but gender dysphoria is real and those who suffer have to do what they have to do to get through life.
Neither you or I can grasp what a person with gender dysphoria must be going through.
On Caitlin, she does not believe she is a woman.
You believe she's a woman though if you're going to call her she.
She believes she needed to make her outside match her inside to continue to go forward.
Read the Mayo write-up on gender dysphoria.
This is not a perversion.
This is a mental disorder.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you.
Well, we're getting a little confused on our terms here.
A perversion is just an aberration, an abnormality, a distortion.
So if you say it's a gender disorder, not a perversion, you're using synonyms here.
It is a perversion.
And in this case, it pertains to sex, the nature of sex itself.
And so it's a sexual perversion.
But yeah, of course, people who have this rare psychological condition...
Perhaps they don't...
Some of them think that they are really the other sex, but perhaps some of them recognize, no, I know I'm not the other sex, but I just have this mental problem where I very much would like to be.
Blair White has made this point.
Blair White is a famous transgender right-wing type person who was actually on my show in the early days.
So, sure, I understand that, and I recognize that it's very difficult, and I imagine that's a very difficult disorder to have.
The question is, what you've hidden here is this line you say, she has to do what she has to do.
What does that mean?
That's one of those expressions like, it is what it is.
Well, no, what is it?
What does she have to do?
Is she she or is she he?
I'll go back to the example I used earlier in the show.
Anorexics.
Perhaps they know.
Some of them think they're too fat.
Perhaps some of them know they're not too fat, but they just have this disorder where they really don't want to eat because they want control or they really want to be really, really thin, or they have this perversion or this disorder where they fetishize being very, very thin.
And they have to do what they have to do, right?
No.
No.
Is it compassionate to indulge the anorexic and say, look, you have this difficult disorder.
I can't imagine how hard that is.
So, yeah, if you don't want to eat for a few days, you shouldn't have to eat.
No, you should.
You should, because it is objectively wrong and disordered, and we should not encourage disorders.
We should not subsidize disorders.
We should not incentivize disorders.
We should push back against them.
There is no evidence That indulging this delusion is helpful to the psychology of people with this disorder.
And even if there were, the indulgence of lies is not justified because it makes some people feel good some of the time or makes them feel some kind of pleasure some of the time.
That is not a good argument.
I recognize the heartstrings issue.
You want these people to feel better.
But I don't think that the indulgence of lies makes them feel better.
And this is a fallen world.
And if we don't cling to truth, if we search for comfort, we might find, or rather, if we search for truth, we might find comfort in the end.
But if we search for comfort, we'll find neither truth nor comfort.
Only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair, as C.S. Lewis says.
Last question.
I love hearing about your new bundle of joy.
I also recently had a baby, and seeing this anti-racist baby book got me wondering, how do I raise an anti-communist baby?
Here's how you do it.
You set your phone or your speaker right next to the crib, and right as the baby's about to go to sleep at night, instead of putting on a noise machine or something like that, you just turn, not so loud, you just tune on the Michael Knowles show.
That is a lullaby that is going to raise a wonderful anti-communist baby.
That's the new lullaby that your child is going to hear.
I wish you luck.
Congratulations on your baby.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, production manager Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Nika Geneva, and production coordinator McKenna Waters.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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