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May 5, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
52:02
Ep. 757 - Divorce, American Style

Bill and Melinda Gates get divorced, Fauci prolongs the lockdowns, and a new celeb preps a run for president. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Bill and Melinda Gates are getting divorced.
Those crazy kids just ain't gonna make it.
They are asking for privacy right now, which is ironic given that they don't seem to care very much about anybody else's privacy on a whole host of matters, not even just tech, but whole aspects of public policy.
However, the reason the Gates divorce matters and they're asking for privacy matters is this actually is not...
A private matter.
And the idea that it is a private matter lies at the heart of a lot of our political problems.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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Left is always redefining terms.
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We no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in the next phase of our lives, say Bill and Melinda Gates in a joint statement on their divorce.
Have you ever heard more ridiculous boomer nonsense than that?
What does that even, what does that mean?
We no longer believe we can grow together.
You're in your 60s.
Bill is.
I think Melinda Gates is in her 50s.
A lady never tells.
What is grow together?
Like you're some 14-year-old child in school.
Look, I just got to find myself.
I got to grow.
No, you're married.
You have children.
You have...
You, more than maybe any other married couple in the world, or more than the vast majority, have built something together.
But now you need to grow?
What does that mean?
What is the next phase of your life?
You know, the next 20 years?
What are you going to do?
You're going to start going to Woodstock or something?
You're going to really explore?
No, you're married.
Cut it out.
Ridiculous boomer nonsense.
The boomers did this.
I'm serious.
No-fault divorce was not permitted anywhere in this country until 1969.
1969, California, of course, becomes the first state to create no-fault divorce.
Before that, if you wanted to get divorced, you had to have a reason for it.
Because divorce is not just a private matter.
Because marriage is not just a private matter.
Marriage is a public contract.
Marriage is a political act that you go in front of people, you stand on the altar, you make these vows, these permanent vows before not just all the people around you, not just the whole community, which is the real political aspect here, but before God.
And Then you have the temerity to ask, well, this is just private.
It's not just private.
You don't invite all of your friends to private acts.
Whenever you do some private acts, you know, that you want to keep very private in your own home, do you invite the whole neighborhood?
No, you don't.
But marriage is a public act.
The state of California decided to make it easier to get divorced only in 1969.
But for the vast majority of our country's history, for the vast majority of our civilization's history, Divorce was very difficult to obtain when it was not outright illegal.
The reason that England split away from the Catholic Church and cemented the Protestant Revolution is because Henry VIII wanted to get a new wife and the Pope said, no, you can't do that.
So Henry, he did not, I guess he didn't get divorced.
He just ordered a nice sharp guillotine from France and then had his new marriage.
There have been some people in recent years, many, many people in recent years, who have said that the conservative answer on marriage is to get the government out of marriage altogether because of these impulses to change the definition of marriage, or to weaken the bonds of marriage, or to make marriage mean something very different than it does.
Get the government out of marriage.
Marriage and the family are the bedrock political institution.
If the government, if the politics does not have something to say about the fundamental political institution, then it doesn't have anything to say about anything.
It is just an incoherent statement to say the government needs to get out of marriage.
Marriage is the fundamental building block of society.
And our politics, the point of politics, is for us to shape our society, for us to make sense of our society and all get along and live together.
There is no such thing as a politics that has nothing to say about marriage.
But we see the weakening of marriage through no-fault divorce.
This is a very bad turn of events.
Do you think society has gotten much better since the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s?
Or has it gotten a little bit worse?
Maybe something's got better, something's got worse.
Well, where are we now?
Are we in a period of ascendancy or a period of decline?
We know that marriage rates are at all-time lows.
We know that divorce is pervasive.
We know that birth rates have absolutely plummeted.
We know that social stability is quite low.
Just look at how they burned the country down, how the radical leftists burned the country down last year.
A little stability wouldn't be such a bad thing.
And amid this total overhaul of the institution of marriage, of the family...
Meghan Markle is writing a children's book about, I kid you not, the importance of family.
Meghan Markle, the biological weapon that the United States obviously engineered to destroy the British monarchy once and for all.
That's for 1812, buddies.
We're going to send you right in there and break up the most...
Legally stable family in the world.
The family for whom their stability is the most important in the world because it has reverberations throughout the entire United Kingdom.
Meghan Markle, who broke up that family...
He's now writing a book about the importance of family.
The book is called The Bench.
It's coming out on June 8th because we are shameless in this society and have no idea what we're talking about anymore.
You'll hear a lot of people say, look, we support all different types of families now.
Look, it's just what we've done.
It's not that we've destroyed the family.
We're just now, it's just family means a lot of different things.
No, no.
Family is a very stable thing.
The family has a basis in nature, right?
When a man and a woman love each other very much, they come together, they raise the kids.
If you want to raise the kids in a flourishing way, in a way that is just and is most conducive to their flourishing, then you remain together in monogamy, you keep strong bonds throughout your whole family, that creates a strong society, and then you can have a stable nation on top of that.
And what we want is we want all the political goodies, we want all the nice things that come from marriage and family, but we don't want any of the work.
Because, contra to what we're hearing from Bill and Melinda Gates here, marriage is not just about how you grow in the phases of your feels, man, you know?
It's not that.
It's about making a commitment.
And recognizing your duty and obligation and fulfilling it before God and, to a lesser degree, but still quite important, before the political community.
Speaking of children, did you know that your children are being exposed to vile, really sick sexual content on television and in the popular culture?
Yeah.
No, I'm not talking about all the crazy drag queen story hour stuff.
No, I'm not talking about that.
I'm not talking about all the weird stuff that they see on the cartoon channels.
I'm talking about Snow White.
Oh yeah.
So Disneyland is reopening.
After being closed for 7 zillion days because of stupid COVID. And Disneyland has this snow white ride that has, according to this columnist in San Francisco Gate, a big problem.
Do you know what the problem is?
You already know.
Because you pay close attention to politics.
You already know what ridiculous gripe this columnist is going to have.
The new ride...
It includes a more comprehensive storyline, and that's the problem.
The new grand finale of the Snow White Enchanted Wish is the moment when the prince finds Snow White asleep under the queen's evil spell and gives her true love's kiss to release her from the enchantment.
A kiss he gives her without her consent.
While she's asleep, which cannot possibly be true love if only one person knows that it's happening.
Haven't we already agreed that consent in early Disney movies is a major issue?
That teaching kids that kissing, when it's not been established that both parties are willing to engage, is not okay!
Okay, I can't.
I do have to keep going on.
I can't stop.
It's hard to understand why the Disneyland of 2021, the current year, no less, would choose to add a scene with such old-fashioned ideas as Prince Charming kissing Snow White.
It's rape.
Snow White is about rape.
According to people who do not understand anything about men and women, love, marriage, family, or anything else in society.
As to the matter of consent, just as a pure plot matter, Snow White is under this evil spell where she's just stuck there forever, right?
I think that given the choice between remain permanently under an evil spell and get kissed by a hot guy, I'm pretty sure Snow White would choose the latter.
I don't think that we need to have a survey.
I don't think we need scientific and philosophical investigations into this.
It's better.
The hot guy should kiss her.
That's a better choice.
But beyond that, What's really at the heart here is that in our liberal society, we have exalted consent to be not just a good, consent is a good, we have exalted it to be the only good.
To the exclusion of virtue, which we're told we can't know.
To the exclusion of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which we're told that we can't know anything about.
Only consent matters.
And we have debased consent to involve a redefinition of liberty as licentiousness.
An idea that we have the right to consent to do all sorts of evil things, even if they harm ourselves or harm society.
Because that's true liberty, according to the modern, ridiculous, liberal definition.
Consent is all that matters.
Marriage, family, raising children, building a life together, that doesn't matter.
The moment that you withdraw your consent, you can rip up the contracts.
Well, if you do that, you rip up the social contract, to use the liberal description of society, and more to it, you rip up society itself.
Very, very perverse, ridiculous, risible, totally laughable idea.
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We were just talking about romance and consent and marriage.
Well, marriage is getting an overhaul even as you get into marriage.
Tiffany is releasing their first ever Men's Engagement Rings.
So, you know, typically for those youths in the audience or those people who have remained single, who have been living under a rock, when you get married, what happens?
The man goes out and buys a ring and he proposes marriage and the woman either accepts or smacks him across the face and says no.
And then she puts the ring on and then you go get married.
And then you can, now both parties wear a wedding ring, though that wasn't always the case, but only the woman wears the engagement ring.
Well, that's changing.
I have had, so I've got to watch my words here, I've had some liberal friends of mine who are men engage in this process already.
The men have worn an engagement ring.
Because they say, well, if the woman wears an engagement ring, I should wear an engagement ring, too.
Because men and women are exactly the same and completely indistinguishable, so, of course, whatever the woman does, the man has to do.
Whatever the man does, the woman has to do.
Okay, I don't agree with that approach, don't agree with that anthropology, but I understand it.
I understand the reasoning there.
Now, Tiffany, by coming out and saying, here is a men's engagement ring, they're taking this beyond a sort of personal eccentricity and saying, this could be a new social tradition.
This could be a new aspect of proposing.
Now, The men's engagement rings, it's called the Charles, Charles Tiffany, and it includes emerald cut and round diamonds up to five carats.
So I don't know, you'd have to be pretty blingy here.
Who is this aimed at for the straight fellas in the audience?
Would you wear the Charles Tiffany engagement ring?
Probably not, right?
But I don't think straight guys are the audience here.
Maybe some feminist guys who think that men and women have to do exactly the same thing.
But I think it's probably the reason for this is because we have now, from the Supreme Court, redefined marriage to include not just monogamous Unions of husbands and wives, but also monogamous unions of the same sex.
And so because of this, if you're a man proposing to another man, who's going to do it?
Which guy is going to do it?
If you're now saying that we are going to redefine and expand the institution of marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions, it does raise a lot of questions.
Because sexual difference has always been important to marriage, it's always been at the heart of marriage, even just to the basic question, who's going to propose the marriage and who's going to accept the marriage, you have to try to work that sort of thing out.
Who gets the ring and do we both get the ring?
This is the one area I've pointed out on this show and other conservatives have pointed this out too, that the transgender ideology undermines the homosexual rights ideology.
And it undermines them because gay rights is very simple, right?
We're born this way.
Some boys like girls, some boys like boys.
And there's really nothing we can do to change that desire.
So society should be more accepting of that.
Okay, totally understand that.
And then the transgender ideology comes in and says, actually, there's no such thing as boys or girls.
And boys can become girls and girls can become boys and everything's mutable.
Well, that so much for the born this way, so much for the you can't change that, so much for the orientation that undercuts it.
But there is one area where the two link up, and that is on the redefinition of marriage.
because if the argument for the redefinition of marriage, which you saw from the Supreme Court, is that M plus W equals M plus M, then M has to equal W.
They have to be indiscernible.
They have to be exactly the same.
And if that is the case, then you're going to see a lot more social rituals, such as the Tiffany men's engagement ring.
You're going to see a social push to take away that which is particular and peculiar to men and that which is particular to women.
And It's all going to have to be the same.
But anyone who's ever been in a marriage knows that it's not the same.
I've got my cute little newborn kid at home.
Could I nurture that kid?
No.
To a degree I can.
I can play with him.
I can kiss him.
I can say, hey buddy, you know, and I can have a nice time and I can even give him a bottle every now and again.
But I cannot provide for that baby what sweet little Elisa can provide for that baby.
Because sweet little Elisa is a lady, and I am a grunting, knuckle-dragging brute.
And the relationship of a baby, of any person, to his mother is different than the relationship to his father.
And that's the way it is, and no amount of social engineering is ever going to change that.
And by the way, for the gay guys in the audience, and ladies too, I don't want to exclude the ladies here, I have had many of my gay friends tell me that when they are in a relationship, the gender roles sort of come out there too.
Some guy is a little more like the traditional guy, some guy is a little more like the traditional girl in the way they interact, in the way they cook, in the way they whatever.
Because those things come from nature, and then civilization has...
So, of course, there is a social aspect to our sex, just as there is a biological aspect, but those two things are connected.
And in this culture, if we're going to just deny that entirely, then things are going to go a little bit kooky throughout all aspects of the society.
And we can make ourselves feel better and say, this is all just private.
Michael, what do you care?
What do you care?
Getting back to the inciting incident here.
What do you care if Bill and Melinda Gates get divorced?
I care quite a lot.
I care a lot if anybody gets divorced.
Because that's people breaking their contract and their pledge, not just to one another and not even just to God.
I suppose that's between the parties involved there.
But they're breaking a pledge to me.
They're breaking a pledge to society.
They're breaking a pledge to their children.
They're breaking a pledge to...
It's the whole culture that they will do their part.
And I know it's a fallen world and these things happen.
But the question is here, are we going to encourage that sort of thing or are we going to discourage that sort of thing?
And the argument made not just by the left, but made by the right now as well, because the right has adopted the ridiculous libertine redefinition of the whole culture that the left has foisted upon us.
This is, by the way, the topic of my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, available now, by the way, for pre-order.
Because we've adopted that language, we don't have any philosophical tools at our disposal to argue for the conservation of culture.
We can't do it.
That's why we don't conserve anything.
That's one of the reasons why we don't conserve anything.
Private decisions have public consequences and vice versa.
This is what you're hearing all the time about the vaccine.
This is the central disagreement at the heart of the vaccine issue, the vaccine passports, the whole public health tyranny.
To what degree does the public have the right to Say something about your private decisions.
To what extent are your private decisions public?
Joe Biden has an important insight about this.
He says if you don't get the vaccine, we're going to die.
You're putting people at risk of dying.
I also want to thank the 105 million Americans of every background who are fully protected from one of the deadliest pandemics in our history.
You know, there's a lot of misinformation out there, but there's one fact I want every American to know.
People who are not fully vaccinated can still die every day from COVID-19.
Look at the folks in your community who have gotten vaccinated and are getting back to living their lives, their full lives.
Look at the grandparents united with their grandchildren, friends getting together again.
This is your choice.
It's life and death.
This is your choice, life and death.
There are people...
He actually made a true statement here.
It's a rare fact for Joe Biden.
There are people who don't have the vaccine who are dying every day.
And therefore, because of the fear of death, he's going to scare you into doing whatever he says.
I'm not taking the arch-libertarian position here that the government never has anything to say about vaccines.
I'm also not taking the leftist position that you all need to get this vaccine immediately.
I'm taking the prudential position that you should assess risk to yourself and society and make a reasonable decision.
I guess that's the Joe Rogan position.
I know you're not allowed to take that anymore, but that to me seems to make a lot of sense.
Prudence is a conservative virtue, even though we seem to have forgotten about it.
But I'm going to go further.
I think what lies at the heart of Joe Biden's threat here is not the fact that unvaccinated people are dying every day.
It's the fact that people are always going to die every day because people are going to die because you can't avoid death.
Because there are certain hard facts about this world that you are not going to escape, no matter whether you give your consent or not.
You're probably not going to consent to die, but you're going to die anyway, someday.
We all are.
This is a finite world.
Okay?
And the...
This liberal modern society wants to deny that fact of death, and it gets people so terrified of it that they will give away all their rights and shut down the whole country for a year and a half because of a virus.
Because of a virus that, you know, it's not great, but it's not worse than many other pandemics that we've gone through.
But they're willing to give it all away because of their terror of death and because of their shock and because of their delusion that they are totally 100% in control of their own lives.
They own their own lives.
They can do whatever they want.
As long as that's consensual, they can do whatever they want, darn it.
No.
You didn't choose to come into this world.
You're probably not going to choose to come out of this world.
A lot of things are going to happen to you in the meantime that are unjust.
I think this has to do with a lot of the crazy leftist entitlement culture and the burning down of the country over the grievance politics as people don't recognize.
There is injustice in this world and you're going to have to deal with that.
That's a fact of life.
And demagogues such as Dr.
Fauci and such as Joe Biden are exploiting that That neurosis, that delusion, that refusal to recognize basic facts of reality, to control your life.
Don't do that.
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Joe Biden's case for getting the vaccine is that if you don't get the vaccine, you're, you're likely to die.
I mean, Basically, people are dying every day.
You got to get it.
Forget about your own risk assessment.
Forget about prudence and your own faculties of reason.
You got to get it.
Okay.
Okay.
That's about as strong a pitch as you can possibly make.
So, Mr.
President, how do we get the vaccine?
I'm going to repeat.
We're going to make it easier than ever to get vaccinated.
Visit vaccines.gov or text your zip code to 438829.
438829.
I'm just going to clear out my ear a little bit.
One more time, where do you get the vaccine?
I'm going to repeat.
We're going to make it easier than ever to get vaccinated.
Visit vaccines.gov or text your zip code to 438829.
438829.
I want to be very careful here because this is a family program.
So all I will say is that I am less likely to get the vaccine after that pitch.
That was not a very persuasive pitch from Joe Biden.
Dr.
Fauci, who is the leader of the coronavirus initiative here, he's the one leading the public health response Finally, Dr.
Fauci, it's been not just two weeks, not just two months.
It's been a long time, pal.
We can finally get back to normal, right?
We let you drag this thing on about 28 or 29 times longer than you said it would take.
Finally, we can go back to normal, right?
We're at the end of the pandemic.
We would hope by the time we get to the end of calendar year 2021 and the beginning of the first quarter of 2022, we'll be able to vaccinate children of any age.
Before I let you go, Dr.
Fauci, you and I are Major League Baseball fans.
What inning are we in as far as this COVID pandemic is concerned?
Well, you know...
We're at least halfway through.
I hope we're seeing, and I do believe, Wolf, I'm not trying to be overly enthusiastic about what's going on vis-a-vis the vaccine program, which is so successful, but we've really got to not declare victory prematurely.
So we're in the late innings, but it's not over.
That's the thing we really got to get people to appreciate.
We're going in the right direction.
We're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
But now is not a time to declare victory.
It's a time to get more and more people vaccinated.
Just the way the president said today, we want to get to that goal.
It's a doable goal, and I believe we'll get there.
So you think the seventh, the eighth inning, the late innings, what inning you're talking about?
How about the bottom of the sixth?
I'll go with the bottom of the sixth.
That's not too bad.
Now, I don't think that Dr.
Fauci has a ton of credibility on the virus because he has admitted that he has misled us.
Remember in that first...
A few weeks where he said, do not wear the masks, you stupid idiots.
Again, I'm paraphrasing.
Don't wear them.
The masks do nothing, idiots.
And then a few weeks later, he says, you have to wear the masks.
And we all said, well, what changed?
And he said, oh, I wanted to make sure there was enough masks for all my friends in public health.
But now there is, so it's cool.
Wear the mask.
You have to.
And you think, well, Dr.
Fauci, if you would be so deeply misleading and dishonest to us about that basic protective element early on, why should we trust you now?
So I don't think he has a ton of credibility on this virus.
But I know he has no credibility on baseball, because if you recall, he was chosen to throw the first pitch out at the Nats game some months ago, and he dribbled the pitch.
He just went like, what was it, right down the first baseline?
It was not great.
And also, by the way, at that game, he wore the mask on the pitcher's mound when he was Far away from everybody.
And then when he got back up in the stands and he thought the TV cameras weren't on him, he was sitting next to friends of his, friends whom he doesn't live with, friends who are not part of his household, and he took the mask down.
And he wasn't even eating.
He was just hanging out.
So, not a ton of credibility.
But he's going to hold his power.
That's what this is about.
Not two weeks in, not two months in, we're now well over a year in.
Dr.
Fauci says we're going to be two years in and he's still not going to give up his power.
Bottom of the sixth.
How much more do you need to see?
What else does he need to tell us before it is clear they're not going to give up this power?
This was a power grab on behalf of the liberal state, which expresses itself through the bureaucracy, and notably through the public health bureaucracy, because public health justifies anything that the left wants to do.
They're grabbing that power and they're going to force us into vaccine passports, which is effectively coercing the vaccine.
They're going to force us into boosters.
They're going to force us into more lockdown measures.
They're going to maintain their stranglehold on business, on church, on civil society, on voting.
Totally upended the voting system because of COVID. Remember, now we have widespread mail-ins, even in states where that is unconstitutional, like Pennsylvania.
Now you've got drop boxes.
Now election day becomes election year.
I don't know.
Election week, election month.
They just keep expanding it.
That's what we're headed toward.
And their argument, by the way, has a slight bit of truth to it, which is private decisions have public effect.
And that's true.
It is not enough for us to say, my body, my choice.
That is the argument that the right has made on matters of public health, on even vaccines.
My body, my choice.
They're just making the abortion argument with a little more persuasiveness, because it really does have to do with your body.
You're not killing another human in there.
But the decision of whether or not to get vaccinated, in theory, does affect vaccines.
Everybody else.
But then you have to get to the, I think, more persuasive conservative argument, which is the prudential argument.
I want to talk about this vaccine.
I want to talk about this virus.
I want to talk about this country right now where lots and lots of people have been vaccinated, where lots and lots of people have antibodies, where the death rate is...
Much lower than we feared in the beginning of this thing.
I want to talk about those particulars because in those particulars, if you are a young, healthy person who's weighing risk, who's making a prudential judgment, you're going to have a very different conclusion than if you're living, I don't know, during the Black Plague where some huge percentage of Europe is getting wiped out because of that pandemic.
We're probably not even going to be allowed to get that kind of information because the blob, the liberal establishment, is teaming up with the private sector.
Talk about breaking down distinctions between public and private.
You've now got the government, the public sector, teaming up with big tech, the private sector, to censor the right, to censor conservatives, and to dominate the political order.
Officials from the California Secretary of State Alex Padilla's office have now been exposed for complaining to social media companies about posts that they didn't like, that contained misinformation regarding the administration of California's elections, or that just made political that contained misinformation regarding the administration of California's elections, or that just made political points that And now we have these records, thanks to Judicial Watch, which does fabulous work.
They They, through the California Public Records Act, got these records.
The Secretary of State's office apparently combed through social media posts, flagging content from users with even very small followings and even videos that had only a couple thousand views.
In some cases, according to reports, for no other reason than because the officials disagreed with the opinions expressed.
Build your own Facebook, Michael.
Come on.
You know that the squish conservatives, who are either extremely ignorant or useful idiots, you know, court jester conservatives whose sole purpose is to prop up the dominant liberal regime, they will say, no, Michael, Facebook's a private company.
Twitter is a private company.
YouTube, Google.
Google is a private company.
They control the flow of information around the public square, but they're a private company.
And so you can't ever, and if they, look, if they want to consent to working on behalf of the liberal establishment through the Secretary of State of California's office, that's totally, that's their consent, that's their decision to make.
These private matters are really starting to sound like political matters to me.
Public matters, public and political mean the same thing.
Maybe it's time for conservatives to exercise our personal choice in the political sphere to bring these people into line.
Through the political process.
Because what we're seeing right now is a totally rigged game.
And conservatives have given away that game by buying the left's stupid propaganda about personal choices.
It's a private matter.
It's a personal choice.
Give me a break.
Speaking of social media platforms, President Trump has one coming out.
People are kind of disappointed with Trump's social media platform because we were hoping he was going to make his own Google.
He was going to make his own Facebook.
He's a billionaire, president of the United States.
He can command at least 70 million people to take what he's doing seriously.
And instead, what we got was effectively a blog that So he unveiled the new social media platform.
It's just donaldjtrump.com slash desk, and it's just his own posts.
So some people are really disappointed about this.
I'm not.
I actually think it's hilarious.
I think it is peak Trump to say we're going to have this great new platform.
Now that I've been deplatformed from Twitter and Facebook and social media, we're going to have a new platform.
And then what's the platform?
It's just his blog with giant buttons that say share to Twitter and Facebook and all over.
So it's just a way to troll the big tech companies and get back in there.
It was not executed very well.
So the only problem I have with I don't have a problem that it's a modest sort of blog.
I don't have a problem that it's only one way, that it's just Trump communicating to us.
My only problem is it's not optimized for maximum trollishness.
Because if you go to the website right now and you try to share, you click the share button to Twitter, it doesn't work.
It actually won't share.
So then you've got to click the link and then share it directly on Twitter, which is taking too many steps out.
But then when you share the link, It's just the picture of Trump shows up and then the kind of boilerplate copy in the bottom of what President Trump has done.
And then only in the headline of the post do you see the first few words of whatever pseudo-tweet he has made, which is always very, very funny.
So I just think if you're going to do it, I like the idea, but you've got to make it very, very easy to share and functional.
And you've got to make the whole post just a way to infiltrate social media.
So instead of the picture of Trump, it should just be a picture of the text of the post.
And instead of the boilerplate copy at the bottom, it should just be the text.
It should just be all of the tweet so that Donald Trump can effectively tweet again and post on Facebook again.
And then you force the big tech company's hand to ban any posts from this one website, which I think makes Trump look really great.
And I think it shows you the real end game here of this censorship, which is any conservative is actually going to make a point.
They're going to have to shut them down.
I think it would be good politically for Trump if he is serious about running in 2024.
And by the way, during his conversation with Candace, sure sounded like he's serious.
If he wants to do that, then he's going to have to ratchet up that trollishness.
Why wouldn't Trump run in 2024?
Look who he's running against.
Joe Biden.
I guess would run again.
He hasn't said that he's going to step down.
He actually probably needs to run again because if the end game here is to get Kamala in, I don't think Kamala can win on her own.
She's very, very unlikable, even among Democrats.
She was one of, if not the first Democrat out of the primary race in 2020.
And I said, you'll remember, I said from the very beginning, watch Kamala.
She's a clever politician.
And when she got booted out of the race, everyone said, oh, Michael, you're an idiot.
I can't believe you thought Kamala was going places.
And she did.
She did.
That call was totally right.
But she still is very unpopular.
So probably what needs to happen is Biden needs to get reelected and then handed over to Kamala.
If Trump runs against Joe Biden, this is the kind of guy that he's up against.
The last thing Americans were around was the amount of wealth that Needs is another tax break.
We need to make a choice to eliminate the loophole, only the gains above for people, only the gains above people making $2 million a year, or excuse me, a couple.
A rate of capital gains rate for people making more than a million dollars a year, which, by the way, would affect three-tenths of 1% of all taxpayers.
Three-tenths of 1% of the top 1%.
And close another loophole, like the real estate investment loophole.
The wealthy are simply paying the same rate on their wages and investment income that raises $40 billion a year for the next 10 years.
The reason I'm bothering to do this is I keep hearing on the press, Biden's going to raise your taxes.
Anybody making less than $400,000 a year will not pay a single penny in taxes.
And we will not increase the deficit either, unlike the last gigantic tax cut, which increased the deficit by $2 trillion.
Wait, hold on.
Nobody making under $400,000 a year will pay a single penny in taxes?
I might need to rethink my political affiliation.
That's pretty good.
You don't have to pay anything?
Because right now I'm paying almost half of my money away in taxes.
Oh no, that's not what he meant.
He meant that he won't pay any more?
It's hard to translate from Biden into English because not only does it come out garbled because he's just exhausted, obviously, and past his prime, but he also just doesn't know what he is talking about.
More and more confusion.
But if Joe Biden runs for re-election, if Donald Trump runs for re-election, oh man, they're going to have some competition.
No, I'm not talking about Kamala, DeSantis, Cruz, Hawley, whoever, anybody who's going to run.
I'm talking about the real competition.
Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?
There's a part of Young Rock, as if you're running for president in 2032.
A lot of people are reading a lot of things into that.
Well, let me take another drink of Terramana before I answer that one.
It always helps with the answer.
I have a goal and an interest and ambition to unite our country.
If this is what the people want, then I will do that.
And this goes back to me wrestling in flea markets.
And used car dealerships, even in that, as small and as intimate and as rowdy as those crowds were, Willie, I still had my finger on the pulse of the people and I always got an idea of what they wanted in that moment.
So I say that to say, like, if the time comes where there is a good amount of people who want to see that happen, then I'm going to consider it.
How will you know if the people are asking you to take that step?
I think you would do deep dives of polling and things like that.
What the people want will lead and inform that decision.
And if it is, in fact, what they want, then I'm going to take another drink of my Taramana and I'm going to say, okay, let's do it.
Terramana, Terramana, Terramana.
You've got to give the guy credit for being an A-list salesman.
He's pushing this tequila that he's using, which raises questions about whether or not he's serious about running.
Is he just using the buzz of the president thing?
To sell tequila.
He's got a big Taramana sign behind him.
He opens up the answer talking about Taramana.
He closes the answer talking about Taramana.
So maybe this is what people said about Trump for years.
They said, oh, he's just trying to sell his brand.
He's trying to sell his neckties.
He's trying to sell his memberships at his golf clubs.
He's trying to sell The Apprentice, whatever.
He's just pretending to run for president so that he can do this.
I'm sure that The Rock realizes, first of all, I'm sure he's paid attention to what Trump did and realizes that it is a good strategy and it can help you as a matter of business.
But also, The Rock has floated this for years.
He has been floating the idea of running for president for a very, very long time.
And he has dipped his toes into politics for a while.
He was sort of a moderate.
He was considered a moderate Republican.
He endorsed Biden and Harris.
In 2020, so I don't really like The Rock.
I don't think I would vote for The Rock.
His politics, I don't think, are my politics.
But I also don't like his answer.
I think this answer is everything wrong with politics.
Would you run for president?
Well, I'd just have to poll.
I'd have to take a lot of polls.
Would you run?
If the people want me to run, Okay, we hear that kind of silly jargon.
There's silly propaganda, you know, from candidates a lot.
I would only run if I were called on to do it, and I would reluctantly accept fun.
But The Rock actually takes it further.
He says, I would just poll, and I would poll, and I would poll.
And then if more people wanted me to run than didn't want me to run, then I would run.
That's not leadership.
That's not what people want.
That is actually bad politics.
People don't vote for you because you just say you'll do whatever they want.
People vote for you because you stand for something.
I remember this in middle school student government elections.
You'd see some people get up there and, seriously, 11, 12 years old, they get up there and say, I'll do whatever you want me to do.
Just please elect me.
And the thinking of very shallow political thinkers is, oh, if I just promise to give the people whatever they want, then they're more likely to vote for me.
But actually, I think they're less likely to vote for you then.
Because it just shows that you don't stand for anything.
You don't believe in anything.
The Rock's whole pitch, his whole political pitch is, I'm a centrist.
I'll just do whatever.
Whatever 50% plus one want to be done, that's what I'll do.
Oh, so you don't stand for anything?
You're a big, tough guy.
You're extremely charismatic.
You're very good looking.
You're very famous.
You're very rich.
But you don't stand for anything.
Why on earth would I vote for you?
I'd be more likely to vote, perhaps, for an honest Democrat.
Because at least I know what I'm getting.
I have no idea what I'm getting with The Rock.
The Rock might end up being much further left because he's just going to go wherever the wind blows.
Really, really bad pitch.
Speaking of leadership, got to get to this.
You know that there's this problem in the Republican leadership in the House.
Namely, Liz Cheney is a member of leadership, but she hates Republicans.
She clearly has disdain for her constituents.
She voted for the second farcical impeachment of Donald Trump.
She parrots Democrat talking points all the time about the big lie.
She says that if you in any way question the 2020 election, you're engaging in the big lie.
This was a phrase popularized by Democrats.
It refers to something coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.
And ironically, when Hitler uses the term the big lie in Mein Kampf, he's actually accusing the Jews of propagating a big lie to blame a certain German general for the loss in World War I. So...
Ironically, though the left is not aware of this, when they use this phrase, they're actually casting themselves as the Nazis in their own analogy.
Neither here nor there.
Liz Cheney totally going along with this kind of rhetoric.
And Kevin McCarthy has previously defended her.
He's the actual, the number one Republican leader in the House.
Well, apparently Kevin McCarthy is losing his patience with Liz Cheney.
Do we have the clip?
I think she's got real problems.
I've had it with her.
I've lost confidence.
Well, someone just has to bring emotion, but I assumed I would probably take that.
So this was reportedly in the crosstalk.
Kevin McCarthy was on with Steve Doocy from Fox News.
And what happens when you're on these shows, and I've been on Fox News many, many times, before the interview goes live on TV, you're just talking to people.
You're talking to the audio engineers, sometimes you're talking to the hosts, and that's supposed to be a private conversation.
Well, since we're only hearing Kevin's side of it here, maybe someone in the room happened to be recording it.
Maybe McCarthy himself is recording it.
Who knows?
But this private conversation is leaked out to the public, and that private view is probably going to have public effects, and Liz Cheney, thankfully, will hopefully be out of Republican leadership by the end of the month.
But a good reminder, a nice little bow on the end to remind us that our private Actions, our private thoughts, our private deeds have public effect and vice versa.
We need to start thinking much more deeply about that.
We need to ditch this shallow language of you do you, shallow language of total privacy to do whatever you want, no matter how vicious, no matter the public effect, if we want to actually conserve anything at all.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
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.
A juror in the Derek Chauvin trial apparently lied his way onto the jury in order to, as he says, bring about social change.
Also, Jill Biden pushes for a universal free community college.
A child was paddled with a wooden board by her teacher while her mother watched.
And finally, I'll explain why anxiety isn't a real mental disorder.
That'll be a popular segment.
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