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May 14, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
50:12
Ep. 764 - Animal Farm

De Blasio tries to bribe New Yorkers with cheeseburgers to take the vaccine, Biden ignores his own CDC, and the Army goes woke. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Some people in low-risk demographics do not want to get the hastily developed COVID vaccine because they know that, statistically speaking, the virus does not pose a great danger to them.
And the libs are very, very upset about this.
But they have now come across what they believe will be a surefire way to convince all of these people to get the vaccine.
Free fries when you get vaccinated?
I got vaccinated.
You're saying I could get this?
The delicious fries?
Wait a minute.
But there's also a burger element to this?
Let me check with Bill Neidhart.
Is it too early in the day to eat a burger?
No.
This could be breakfast?
Okay.
I want you to look at this and think about...
Don't make me watch this, no.
Some people love hamburgers, some don't.
Really want to respect all ways of life.
But if this is appealing to you, just think of this when you think of vaccination.
Vaccination.
I'm getting a very good feeling about vaccination rate this moment.
If that is what I think of when I think of vaccination, I'm never getting any vaccinations again.
I regret getting the polio vaccination if that is what I have to think of.
The argument is, hey, you animals, hey, let us stick you with this needle and we'll give you more slop.
Yeah, you like slop, don't you, you filthy animals, you gluttons.
Yeah, get the burger.
That made me at least 99.7% less likely to get the vaccine.
I'm Michael Knowles, this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Absolutely gross.
My favorite comment yesterday from Paula Christofferson, who says, I've listened to Knowles for a couple of months now, and I'm radicalized.
You know, Paula, what you don't realize is that comment is going to come up in court someday when I've been fully charged with crimes against wokeness, and I'm on trial to figure out which gulag I'm going to get sent to.
They're going to say, here's the evidence.
Welcome.
now if you believe that we need to trans the kids and men can be women, you are mainstream, you're normal, you're a humanitarian.
And if you think like maybe we shouldn't do that, you're a radical.
Welcome to the radical side.
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What the libs are trying to create is an elaborate system of carrots and sticks to get us to do what they want us to do.
And you've seen the carrot.
The carrot is the cheeseburger.
Bill de Blasio, that disgusting glutton, just letting juice drip down his face on television because he thinks that's going to entice us.
That's the carrot.
And then the stick is Joe Biden, who tweeted out yesterday, quote, The rule is now simple Get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do The choice is yours No.
And no, I think I'm not vaccinated.
I don't have any plans to get vaccinated anytime soon.
And I'm not wearing a mask.
I'm not wearing a mask basically anywhere.
The only place they make me wear a mask, and I have no way around it, is on airplanes.
Because you're in that little tin can, and they'll arrest you if you don't.
Otherwise, I ain't doing it.
Ain't wearing a mask, hugging people, shaking hands.
I'm like two seconds away from just French kissing people on the street.
Because that is how unafraid I am of this thing.
And so Joe Biden knows that this is sort of an empty threat.
He knows there's really no way to enforce this, especially because the governors are the ones that are really going to be doing this.
And you've got governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida who are pushing the Knowles option on licking doorknobs and kissing strangers.
At this point, you know, it's totally open.
Frankly, DeSantis has been open now for a year, but other states are following suit.
So Biden knows this isn't going to work.
And the dominant liberal regime is going to have to loosen up on some of the rules, which is what they're doing right now.
The CDC has come out and said, this is so wonderful.
You're so lucky.
They've said, if you're vaccinated, There is no need, in most circumstances, to wear a mask indoors.
Today, CDC is updating our guidance for fully vaccinated people.
Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing.
If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing We have all longed for this moment, when we can get back to some sense of normalcy.
Based on the continuing downward trajectory of cases, the scientific data on the performance of our vaccines, and our understanding of how the virus spreads, that moment has come for those who are fully vaccinated.
Now, do you see what's changed here?
What was it?
Two, three weeks ago, we were being told by the public health professionals that even once you're vaccinated, you still need to wear a mask.
You still need to socially distance.
Nothing can change.
It doesn't matter that you're vaccinated.
It doesn't matter that your friends are vaccinated.
You can't change anything.
Fauci was pushing this most prominently.
And then what happened?
Well, just like they do, it seems like every few days here, they completely changed the guidance.
Why?
Because there was no scientific discovery that led them to this conclusion.
It was a political realization.
They want people to get the shot.
People aren't getting the shot.
The reason people aren't getting the shot is because nothing changes if they get the shot.
Fauci was telling them, no, you still have to wear the mask, sheep.
You still have to physically distance, you sheep.
And so they said, okay, well, if I've got to do all this nonsense, regardless of whether or not I get the shot, then I'm just not going to get the shot.
So now Fauci, the head of the CDC, Joe Biden, realize, oh, okay, if we want to incentivize people to get the shot, we actually have to give them something once they do it.
So now what they're saying is you can not wear a mask and you can hang out indoors with people.
Okay.
I've been doing that since the very beginning.
I've been doing that since, at the very least, last...
Easter, I guess even earlier than that.
You know, Easter was like two weeks to slow the spread.
But even before that, I've just been ignoring these people the whole time.
And you know what?
My life's been great.
It's been awesome.
And I really do wish that other people had tuned these guys out early on because they've squandered so much time.
People canceling weddings.
People canceling social events.
People not seeing their loved ones.
Some of those elderly loved ones who have died in the meantime.
And they didn't do it because they were listening to these idiots at the egghead agencies.
Instead of just ignoring them.
So it's great.
Now they're saying, okay, Michael, you can ignore us.
And I say, okay, well, you know, cool.
I'll keep on keeping on then, fellas.
That sounds great.
Not everyone's gotten the message from the CDC, namely Joe Biden.
Who is supposed to be the big boss here.
Joe Biden is not following the updated CDC guidance.
He is still wearing a mask indoors, even though he's been vaccinated and everyone around him has been vaccinated.
Why is that?
Well, a Biden advisor here has come out, Andy Slavitt, and said, no, no, no.
The reason that Joe is going to wear a mask when all you people are not is because a different set of rules applies to very important people.
Well, look, I think people who've been vaccinated are starting to get a little bit impatient with, what can I do?
You know, can I go indoors?
Can I take masks off, etc.?
And I think the CDC is getting there step by step.
So right now, you can do pretty much everything outdoors without a mask.
You can do everything indoors if you're around vaccinated people without a mask.
Why were they all wearing masks in there yesterday?
I'm not sure that the president is the average person.
I personally think there's a lot of protections around the president.
Why does he need lots of Secret Service agents?
Why do they belt and suspender everything with the president?
Because he's a very important person.
And I think you shouldn't take your mark just by what you see in the Oval Office.
I think most people, if you're indoors, around other people that are vaccinated, the CDC says it's okay.
And I think you should listen to the CDC on that.
What?
The president has secret service around him because people are trying to kill him with bullets and guns.
And most of us do not have people coming after us with bullets and guns.
And by the way, when they do, we will either conceal carry or some people have security, right?
So that makes sense.
The virus does not discriminate against very important people.
The virus is a virus, right?
It just, in fact, anybody who's vulnerable to it.
So if the CDC is now saying, if you're vaccinated, you are not at risk of the virus, everybody, you can look just like Joe Biden, you'd be exactly the same age, you'd share all the same characteristics, then why is the virus going to be particularly dangerous to Biden?
It doesn't make any sense.
But then, Joe Biden has not made any sense for a very long time.
He was asked, this is almost sad, if the guy weren't I had a brief conversation with him yesterday,
and I have my...
My intelligence community, the Defense Department, as well as the State Department have been in contact with all of their counterparts in, not only in Israel, but in the region.
And one of the things that I have seen thus far is that there has not been a Significant overreaction.
The question is how we get to a point where they get to a point where there is a significant reduction in the attacks, particularly the rocket attacks that are indiscriminately fired into population centers.
I've been looking at the—in Israel, they had people there firing there, and I looked and I talked to— Oh, what was that?
Was there anything, huh?
What happened?
The guy is clearly not up to the job.
And you see it reflected in his foreign policy, by the way.
I'm under no misapprehension that Joe Biden is actually running things over there.
But the people that he's empowered are just as exhausted as he is.
Maybe not physically, but ideologically.
They're just returning to the same exact Middle Eastern strategy that failed for decades and decades and decades to bring about any semblance of peace.
Then Trump comes in, completely upends that policy and doubles the number of Arab countries that have recognized Israel and gets two historic peace deals.
Biden comes in and it's the same zombie president and the same zombie government with the same zombie policies giving us.
It feels like Night of the Walking Dead or something like that.
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Joe Biden appears very confused.
However, there are, believe it or not, people who are even more confused than Joe Biden.
I'm speaking of the first transgender bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
So the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America...
It's apparently a mainline Protestant denomination, and over the weekend it became the first one to elect a transgender bishop, meaning that a lady pretending to be a man is now considered a bishop in an organization pretending to be a church.
We are underneath many, many layers of pretense at this point.
She said, Actually, I have to couch this here because I say she because she's a lady who's pretending to not be a lady, but it's not even so simple as she's pretending to be a man.
She's still going by the name Megan, Megan Rohrer, and her pronouns are they and him.
So when she is the subject of a sentence, she pretends to be multiple people.
But when she is the object of the sentence, she pretends to be a single person who is also a man.
This, I would say the nearest analog I've heard to this is in the Bible, when you hear various spirits crying out from bodies, We are legion!
You cannot do that.
You cannot be multiple people at one moment, or in one grammatical structure, and then a single person in another grammatical structure, and you can't be a man if you're a woman.
And you can't be...
A bishop, if you are a woman, or even if you're a woman pretending to be a man.
Caught up?
Confused enough?
Okay, here's what she said.
The First Council of Nicaea's first action was to try to limit the leadership roles of trans pastors and bishops.
I'm going to put a pause there.
I'm a little skeptical of that claim.
You know, the Council of Nicaea did a lot of stuff, but I don't...
Okay.
I'm going to put a little pause there.
I'm grateful that the Lutherans of the SPS ELCA are beginning to dismantle this and some of the other hurdles by POC What is the BIPOC? Does anyone know what BIPOC is?
I know it's like a race thing or a sex thing or something.
Is it a bisexual thing or is it like a black?
Because POC, I assume, is person of color.
But anyway, I don't know.
Someone will give me the update.
Other hurdles that BIPOC and LGBTQ pastors, misspelled, encounter.
So...
With regard to the claims about the First Council of Nicaea, that didn't happen because that's not a thing.
I'm not just saying that transgender bishops, I'm saying that it's not a thing.
The producers are updating me now.
BIPOC means black and indigenous people of color.
And I'm looking at a picture of this woman.
She is most certainly none of those things.
But, I don't know, now it's just slogans.
We did a whole show yesterday on the slogans and you just spout them unthinkingly.
It's not a thing.
You just simply cannot be a woman who has all the physical characteristics of a woman, but then, because she is confused in some way, is on some deeper metaphysical level a man.
That just isn't true.
And the irony, of course, that she's making this claim about the First Council of Nicaea is that the Christian understanding of human nature is directly contrary to...
Her claim about human nature.
The Christian understanding of human nature is that we're body and soul joined inextricably on earth.
The transgender claim about human nature is a Gnostic claim, is the idea that really we're secretly something other than the way we look and the way that we physically are.
So that did not happen at the First Council of Nicaea.
Something that did happen at the First Council of Nicaea, Saint Nicholas punched the Heresiarch Arius in the face because he just couldn't stand his heresy anymore.
Santa Claus himself got pretty rough with the very charismatic and popular Arius because he was spatting heresy.
You know, not very open-minded man.
Not just going to debate everything in the free marketplace of ideas, you know, and the best ideas are going to win out.
No.
This, actually the whole purpose of the council, right, is not just to include everything and everybody, right?
But ultimately, to exclude things.
To exclude heretical ideas and organizations.
Because that's the only way that you can have a church.
It's the only way you can define.
Forget a church.
It's the only way you can have any discrete thing.
A nation is a nation because the things outside of it are not the nation.
An idea is an idea because things that contradict it are not that idea.
That is a very important purpose here, and the libs try to make us forget that.
But many conservatives have just gone along with that.
We say, look, we're just open-minded.
We're free speech absolutists.
This is the fundamental flaw with our strategy the last several decades that I take up in my upcoming book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is available now for pre-order.
Doing great on the pre-order yesterday.
I also have to make an apology for those on this show.
I plugged the book too many times yesterday.
I plugged it five times, and after the dings and everything, by the fifth one, the screen started to shake and ultimately cracked.
It was very scary for me here in the studio as well, but I'm sure it was very scary for the audience.
I'm going to try to restrain myself just a little bit more today.
It is not just this weird Lutheran church that has mistaken ideas about identity and its mission and the idea that things can be totally open forever and ever and ever.
The U.S. Army has gone totally woke as well.
We played a couple of weeks ago a CIA recruitment ad about some woman talking about, I'm proud, I'm brilliant, I'm a Latina woman, feminist, intersectional, and just this woke insanity.
It made me want to just abolish the CIA the first chance I possibly can.
But unfortunately now the army is following suit.
This is the story of a soldier who operates your nation's Patriot Missile Defense Systems.
It begins in California, with a little girl raised by two moms.
Although I had a fairly typical childhood, took ballet, played violin, I also marched for equality.
I like to think I've been defending freedom from an early age.
I finished high school at the top of my class, and then attended UC Davis, where I joined a sorority full of other strong women.
But as graduation approached, I began feeling like I'd been handed so much in life.
A sorority girl stereotype.
I needed my own adventures.
My own challenge.
And after meeting with an Army recruiter, I found it.
A way to prove my inner strength.
And maybe shatter some stereotypes along the way.
I'm U.S. Army Corporal Emma Malone Lord, and I answered my calling.
Huh?
So when I was a kid, this is going to date me, go way back.
The army recruitment ads were a bunch of tough guys jumping out of airplanes and shooting guns and stuff like that.
And the slogan was, be all that you can be.
And it was like really tough guys.
And now, now the army recruitment ads are about how lesbians on Santa Monica Pier raised a ballerina who then joined the army later.
And And what does she do?
What's the mission?
It's just the identity is the mission.
You see here.
I'm not surprised that the Army and the CIA are doing this.
I mean, these are...
Defenders of the establishment.
If anything is a defender of the establishment, surely it would be the military and the intelligence communities, right?
The national security state.
And the establishment at this point has totally gone woke.
It's totally delved into identity.
And there's this shift.
This is actually...
I'm going to totally hit the plug counter again today.
Because this is a shift that I detail in my book Speechless, which is that...
Under the old moral order, what matters most is what you do.
Under the new political correctness code, what matters most is what you say.
All the language we use, all the woke jargon.
Under the old moral order, we found our identity in God, right?
God who says, I am that I am, right?
That's the essence of being.
We find our identity out there, so we don't think about ourselves very much.
Under the new woke leftist moral order, all we ever think about is who we are.
All we ever think about is our own identity, right?
My priest, Father George Rutler, famously said that when you...
When you lose your identity in the I am, when you divorce your identity from the I am, you're left with a pitiful question, which is, who am I? And you see this mostly on the left.
I'm black, I'm a woman, I'm a lesbian, I'm a BIPOC, transgender, they, him, bishop, Lutheran, whatever.
But you see it in some identitarians on the right.
I'm white, or I'm Nordic, or I'm this, or I'm that, or I'm this, or I'm that.
All of that, though, is such a shift from the old idea.
And you see it so clearly in the army.
You know what the point of the army is?
Kill our enemies.
That's the point.
Kill and deter, by killing, deter the other ones, people who want to harm us.
But now that shift of doing is totally, that sense of doing is totally gone.
All of the recruitment for the CIA as well is gone.
Who I am.
Who I'm going to be in my identity, in my mind.
Not what I'm actually doing, but in my mind.
In my mind, I can make a hell of heaven or heaven a hell, is what Satan said in Paradise Lost.
And we're starting to see it all around us.
Speaking of bad art.
We see this awful, ridiculous recruitment ad from the United States Army, but it's not just the United States which is producing really bad art.
London now.
In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan has spent 7 million pounds.
So what is that?
I don't know the exchange rate right now, but you're talking certainly north of 10 million dollars, 14 million dollars maybe, on new public art.
And one of the things that he wanted to have redesigned is the sign at Piccadilly Circus, one of the subway steps.
Okay, so if you go into this tube station in London now, you will see some pictures made by David Hockney.
Actually, just one picture, which could have been made on Microsoft Paint in 1995.
Just an O, just a yellow O, and then a purple drawing that says Piccadilly Circus, and the S is kind of below the rest of it, and that's on a white background.
That's it.
I could have made this in 90 seconds, probably.
Who knows how much money this guy got?
And the mayor of London tweets out, quote, brilliant work from David Hockney in Piccadilly, the first of a series of major art projects we've commissioned as part of our brand new Let's Do London campaign.
Lots more to come very soon.
Hashtag David Hockney.
And everybody is making fun of this.
I can tell you.
This art is terrible.
And I have a little bit of authority on this topic because I am one of the most successful modern artists alive today.
This is true.
I am.
This is not a joke.
The blank book.
I've sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a blank book.
The book is just a little picture on the front, some blank stuff on the back, and then a bunch of blank stuff in the middle with a bibliography.
That is a modern art piece.
I hate modern art, but that certainly is a modern art piece.
And it's just about as popular a modern art piece as anyone else.
And I can tell you, I speak with credibility here.
Modern art is terrible.
What is so terrible about this?
Well, first, anyone can do it, right?
There's no artistry.
There's no skill here.
Anyone could do the blank book, right?
Anyone could do the Piccadilly Circus sign.
Anybody can do the urinal.
That urinal is one of the most famous modern art pieces, one of the earliest too.
I mean, the...
The examples abound.
Anybody can do it.
But not anybody did do it, Michael.
You did the blank book and no one else did.
Okay, I guess.
Yeah, but that's still a problem.
That it requires no actual skill.
Second, it's ugly.
The Piccadilly Circus thing is not beautiful.
It's lopsided.
It's ugly.
Like so much modern art.
It seems to be part of a cult of ugliness.
You see this especially with modern architecture, postmodern architecture.
It's hideous.
It's inverted.
The angles are all wrong.
It's incongruous.
Because the thought process here is that all of our standards of beauty are just totally socially constructed.
There's nothing eternally true.
There's no rhyme or reason to the universe.
and so if I, you know, if I paint the Mona Lisa or I have a urinal on a wall, they're both equally beautiful, right?
It's just because it's the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it's just, it's all just, if we lived in a society where we were socialized and conditioned to think that the urinal is more beautiful than the Mona Lisa, then we would think that.
There's nothing just intrinsic to the art that makes us attracted to it.
Okay.
And it's childish.
This piece in particular, the Piccadilly Circus thing, it is designed to look like a child made it.
But there's a difference between childlike and childish.
We're told that you can't get into heaven unless you are like a child, right?
In the sense of childlike wonder, childlike innocence.
But there's a flip side, too.
I can say this as a new parent, you know.
Children can be little brats quite a lot.
Everyone who's ever been around a child knows that.
And this art is childish.
It's It's just not up to snuff.
And there really is such a thing as beauty.
And there really is such a thing as goodness.
And there really is such a thing as truth.
And everybody can deny it.
And we can have that ugly Piccadilly Circus thing up everywhere all over the country.
And it still won't be beautiful.
Even if a bunch of people pretend it still won't be.
Because those transcendentals, beauty, goodness, truth, are eternally true.
Speaking of childish British creations, Prince Harry is whining about being in the spotlight.
For a guy who doesn't like attention, this guy sure attracts a lot of attention and seeks a lot of attention.
He was whining about being in the spotlight on a podcast.
Helplessness.
That's my biggest sort of Achilles heel.
Yeah, feeling helpless hurts.
It really hurts.
And that's when you think to yourself, I've got the privilege, I've got the platform, I've got the influence, and even I can't fix this.
I can't change this.
I was liking it to Truman Show.
Have you seen that movie?
It's between the Truman Show and being in a zoo.
I think the biggest issue for me was that being born into it, you inherit the risk.
You inherit the risk that comes with it.
You inherit every element of it without choice.
And because of the way that the UK media are, they feel an ownership over you.
Literally, like a full-on ownership.
And then they give the impression to some of their, well, most of their readers that that is the case.
But I think it's a really dangerous place to be if you don't have a choice.
But then, of course, then people, quite rightly, will turn around and go, so what if you didn't have a choice?
It was privilege.
So, if Prince Harry really wants privacy, he just needs to stop going on shows.
He just needs to sort of back away and live his private life with a lot of money and have his privacy.
But he doesn't want that.
He only wants glowing, fawning media coverage and to placate his insane wife.
But he doesn't He's not actually seeking the thing that he says he's seeking.
He just wants everyone to be really nice to him and no one ever to be mean to him.
He wants to have all the benefits of being in the public, but none of the downside of being in the public.
And that simply is not how it works.
We need real leaders right now.
Before we get into the mailbag, I have to give a shout out.
Ron DeSantis doing a great job as governor of Florida.
Ron DeSantis just pardoned a couple that had been arrested for keeping their gym open.
He just pardoned them.
He said, nope, sorry, this crazy public health state, you're not going to face consequences We're going to bring some justice here through the pardon system.
He's also pardoning anyone who was arrested for not masking or social distancing, one of the most Orwellian and ridiculous phrases of my lifetime.
This is great stuff.
This is great leadership.
All the other governors should be following suit.
No question about it.
Great stuff.
Obviously, DeSantis would appear to have his eyes on the highest political prize in 2024, and he's doing a very good job setting himself up for that.
Still need to see more from him, obviously.
It's early on, but he's doing really good stuff.
Also, speaking of real leaders, they booted Liz Cheney out of Republican leadership.
That's good.
That had to happen.
The person they wanted to replace her is this woman, Elise Stefanik, but Elise Stefanik is much more liberal than Liz Cheney.
Elise Stefanik, she voted for the Equality Act, that crazy transgender bill.
She voted for amnesty for illegal aliens.
She posed a lot of Trump priorities, but then at the very end of the Trump administration, she sort of came around to him.
So President Trump likes her a lot and endorsed her for this position.
There is an actual conservative right now who is challenging her, Chip Roy.
Chip Roy is a solid conservative.
There's no perfect candidate.
People are going to say, well, there's this issue with Chip Roy.
Well, there's this issue.
Sure.
But some people are squishier than others.
A, a GOP that respects its conservative base will put Chip Roy in leadership and a squished GOP will elevate Elise Stefanik.
And it's just that simple.
Trump likes Stefanik right now.
You know, I love Trump, you know, big, big supporter of the guy and voted for him twice.
Elise Stefanik ain't it.
It's She just ain't it.
Chip Roy, much, much more conservative choice.
It's not even close.
It's not even a question.
Very glad there is a choice, not just an echo, and they're not just going to cram Stefanik down our throats once they booted Liz Cheney out.
You've got to be on the lookout right now for Ben's new book, The Authoritarian Moment.
I've told you that if I run for office, that this is going to be my campaign slogan.
Knowles 2024, The Authoritarian Moment.
The Authoritarian Moment is right now available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes& Noble, or any other major bookseller.
It is really terrific to pre-order Ben's book right after you pre-order Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which you can also get on all those places.
If you've been wondering what it's like to watch Candace Live, well, guess what?
Now's your chance to find out.
Tickets to join Candace's live studio audience in Nashville are free.
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We'll be right back with the mailbag.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite time of the week, the mailbag.
First question from Scott.
Michael, my girlfriend and I are moving across the country for her job and we're going to live and start our adult lives together.
We're both fresh out of college.
I want to get married.
I know she does too.
I know what your answer is going to be.
I agree.
Kayla, as long as you got that.
So where's the question?
However, we can't really afford to have a wedding with our friends and family there who we will soon live far away from.
And I feel that the legitimacy of a courthouse wedding is questionable.
As we're not swearing our vows in front of God and family.
I was hoping you might have some thoughts and advice.
Came for Ben, stayed for Noel, subscribed for Klavan.
Okay, well, I guess that's fine.
That works well enough for me.
Get married.
You knew the answer.
You wrote into the show to get the answer that you knew I was going to give you.
Just get married.
You want to do it.
Your girlfriend wants to do it.
You've gotten past the hurdles.
I wish I'd gotten married younger than I did.
In the culture that I come from, getting married at 28 or 27, it's like you've got a child bride.
In secular New York culture, people are saying, no, wait until you're 40, wait until you're 50.
But if you come from a good culture and you and your girlfriend have your priorities in line, then just get married.
You don't need to do it in front of a courthouse.
You can do it in a church.
Let's say you don't have $50,000 lying around to throw some grand, elaborate, fancy wedding.
Okay.
Do you have, like...
$2,000?
Can you scrounge up like $2,000?
I bet you can.
And for that, you can have a very nice wedding in a church, so it will be very, very beautiful.
More beautiful than most of the nonsense people do today when they try to make it all up themselves on some fancy location or in some dining hall or something like that.
If you're in a church, you already got a lot of beautiful architecture for you.
You don't have to pay a penny for it.
And then have the reception either in the parish hall, or I don't know if you may be Protestant, and I'm sure there's some church hall somewhere, and...
You can cater it very cheaply.
I've been to a number of weddings in the last four or five years, and some of them have been, you know, $70,000 crazy blowouts, and some of them have been like $3,000 very modest affairs, and sometimes the more modest ones are much more beautiful than the crazy elaborate ones.
So I would just do that.
Do not Do not put the cart before the horse here.
This is an observation that actually, speaking of staying for Clavin, he made early on, which is that as weddings have gotten crazier and crazier and crazier, marriage has become more and more shallow.
So the appearance of the thing has gotten really elaborate, but the thing itself has atrophied.
What is important, what you're going to want, is to be married.
You can do that.
I'm not saying you can do it for free, but you can do it before God and before at least some people in your community for not a lot of money.
And by the way, you're going to have to start making a bunch of money anyway once you get married.
So, you know, if you can scrounge up a little bit of cash to cater, you know, cater, I don't know.
Cater the local deli.
Cater Chick-fil-A and you'll have a lovely time.
You'll have wonderful memories.
The one thing I wouldn't skimp on is the photographer.
You actually do want to have a good photographer.
And then you'll be married and your life is starting and you don't need to worry about planning a party for three years because now you get to plan your life together and your family.
From Joshua.
Hello, Mr.
Knowles.
My question is, I have started a new job and they are wanting us to be tolerant and accept the transgender ideology of children.
Oh my gosh.
The person teaching the class said they were a Christian, but decided they would just accept this ideology.
I just don't see how they can say they're Christian, but are okay with transiting the children.
What do I do?
I feel like I should speak out, but I also don't want to be ridiculed for my beliefs.
Thank you so much for everything that The Daily Wire does.
I will continue to listen and be an All Access member.
Well, since you're a Christian, you'll remember that they turned Jesus into a clown.
Do you remember that?
Do you remember when the Roman centurions, when they put Jesus in a silly costume with the robe and the staff and the crown of thorns and they mocked him and beat him and made fun of him and ridiculed him?
That it is not a fear that you might have that you'll experience some ridicule for your faith.
That is a promise of the faith.
So I wouldn't worry about that.
Yeah, transing the kids is just, that's not permitted.
I would speak out.
Courage is the prerequisite for all of the other virtues.
Without courage, you can't have any of the other virtues.
And people write in all the time.
They say, hey, should I have integrity or should I just go along to get along?
But then someday I'll have integrity down the line.
No, you won't.
You won't have integrity down the line if you keep your head down now because you'll just keep your head down forever and then you'll die.
So yeah, you should certainly speak out.
And you know what?
You might lose your job.
So, I'm sorry that I have to be the one to tell you that you've got to be willing to lose your job to stand against transing the kids, but you do.
And you should get a better job.
This does not mean that you have to be flamboyant about every single one of your views all the time, but if it comes down to, hey, you need to go along with transing the kids, you just can't do that.
No one should be doing that.
From Selena.
Hey Michael, I'm a junior in high school and I go to a Catholic school.
I'm getting confirmed into the church soon.
Great.
And I asked one of my teachers to be my sponsor.
I really respected her and how nice she is.
She's done a lot of great things for people.
In class, someone had told her that I'm a conservative.
I never hide the fact that I am, but I guess my teacher didn't realize it.
After class, she told me to rethink my decision on picking her as my sponsor for confirmation because of my political beliefs.
She's a raging liberal, and I never held it against her until now because she started making rude remarks about the fact that I'm a conservative.
Should I rethink who my confirmation sponsor should be?
Thank you for being you.
I never would have made the decision to become Catholic without listening to you, Selena.
Wow, that's great.
Thank you very much.
I'm so pleased to hear that.
When people tell you who they are, you should believe them.
So what I would say here, I don't know, obviously, the specifics of your situation.
I had plenty of extremely liberal teachers, and I'm still in touch with many of them, actually, from high school and even earlier.
And we get along great.
And they'll tease me about my politics, and I'll tease them about their politics.
And we would even do it when I was in school, and it really wasn't a big deal.
It was kind of fun.
But here, as in all things, you can utter the same sentence.
And if you utter it with love and humility, it's going to have a very different meaning than if you utter it with resentment and pride.
So if your teacher is saying, oh, here comes, here is that knuckle dragon, Attila the Hun Selina.
Okay, hey Selena, how you doing?
Hey, are you sure you want me to be your confirmation sponsor?
You know I'm a big lib.
You know I got the coexist bumper.
You sure?
Okay, that's fine.
If it's sort of joking and loving, that's one thing.
If it is, as you say, rude, passive-aggressive, if she was serious when she said, you should rethink this, then of course, under no circumstances should you have her be your spiritual advisor here.
I mean, your spiritual mentor coming into the faith.
We're sponsoring to the church.
Also, because depending on how much of a lib she is, she's very likely a heretic.
Not to put it bluntly, we started out talking about heresy earlier on.
If she is a huge lib, if, for instance, she supports legal abortion, that's a big, big problem.
If she supports redefining marriage, if she supports trancing the kids or something like that, I mean, you really should run in the opposite direction when you're talking about a sponsor.
So, I think it does depend on the meaning of what this teacher is saying, you know, and the sense in which her comments have been made.
But, yeah, if she's telling you who she is, then believe her.
Next question from Tegan.
Hey, Michael.
I'm from a small farming community in northern Utah.
I've been a listener for a couple years, just subscribed last week.
I'm a big fan of your show.
Why do politicians and people always quote that, quote, our democracy is at stake when our country is not a true democracy?
What is the correct term to describe our political system?
I hear strong conservatives often describe it as a constitutional republic.
What are your thoughts?
This is a keen insight.
Yes, there is a distinction between republics and democracies, but it's not so cut and dry as they're being totally different.
There's considerable overlap in the way these terms are used, especially in regard to our own country, because the real complicating factor here is the framers describe this distinction in the Federalist Papers, but the examples they give of republics very often are direct democracies, and the examples they give of democracies are republics, and so it's just very confusing.
I would focus less on those abstract terms and more on the nature of the government itself.
We have a specific constitutional structure.
It is different than other republics.
It is different than other democracies.
It is unique.
It has its own unique traditions.
It has its own unique pillars of government.
And it's evolved in different ways.
It's been transformed in different ways, too.
But The phrase, our democracy is at stake, is just silly nonsense.
I did a whole show yesterday on dead, dumb rhetoric, mostly from the left, but there's a fair share of it on the right as well.
And this would be a good example of that.
I mean, this is one that is used almost exclusively by libs who despise democracy, right?
They're people who...
From the progressive project starting 100 years ago, took political power away from the people and gave it to egghead technocrats to run our lives for us.
Very anti-democratic in a lot of ways.
So, and this phrase is also used by the squishy Republicans who want to suck up to the libs because they're just court jesters in the kingdom of liberalism and their whole job is to lose with dignity, even though they don't have dignity at all.
So, all of that to say...
Get into the specifics here.
How is our democracy at stake?
You hear this phrase a lot with January 6th.
They almost, they came into our democracy, our sacred temple of democracy.
First of all, in our sacred temple of democracy, very little legislation is done in the Capitol.
Most of it's done at the agency, the executive agencies.
But furthermore, I think the real threat to our democracy, the more serious threat, came when BLM burned the country down for a year previously, when Maxine Waters told people to attack Republicans in public.
Get up on them.
Get in their face.
You form a crowd.
Remember that?
That's a greater threat.
But when we're only talking in these abstract sort of slogans, then a lot of that is lost.
From Killian, Dear Mr.
Knowles, In July of last year, I started dating this girl that I truly thought I was going to marry.
After four months, she broke up with me because things got to be too busy in her personal life and starting her first teaching job and pursuing an athletic career.
Wow, she was busy.
She said, I can honestly say I truly loved her and still do, just the timing was not in our favor.
I feel waiting around for someone is never a good idea, but I've been on some other dates and I can't seem to connect with anyone.
What do you think of this situation and what would you do?
I'm going to give you what seems like contradictory advice, but it's really not.
You should pursue the girl that you want.
If you want this girl, you should pursue this girl.
And you've got to man up to do it.
So you can't just be like, well, we'll be good on your schedule.
And by the way, I've got my personal freedom and I'm going to be on the road 20 days a week.
But no, you've got to man up and just be like, nope, you're going to spend more time with me and I'm going to make an effort and I'm going to reduce the amount I'm on the road or something to pursue the girl.
Also, If she really just doesn't want to be with you, if she just used the timing thing as an excuse, which she may well have done, I don't know.
Women try to be nice sometimes when they dump you.
If that is the case, then you should not debase yourself by pursuing a girl who is in no way interested in you.
I'm not saying you can't Persuade a girl to become interested in you, but you're not going to do it by groveling and begging and looking like a chump.
I know those things seem like contradictory pieces of advice.
What they ultimately come down to is be confident.
You always hear this, hey man, how do I pick up a girl?
Be confident.
But I'm not confident.
Right, so just be confident.
Well, how can I be confident if I'm not going to just do it?
You've got to, to quote the Godfather, talking to Johnny Fontaine, you're going to act like a man!
What's the matter with you?
That's what you've got to do.
And this means that sometimes you pursue the girl quite directly, and sometimes this means a tactical retreat, okay?
That the way you win a war is not just by rushing into battle when you're going to lose, and it's not just by retreating.
Wars are not won by evacuations, to quote Winston Churchill.
But you need to Using prudence, which is a very important conservative virtue, strike that balance and above all, be confident because courage is the prerequisite of all the other virtues.
One more question from Roland.
Michael.
First, gotta say I love the show.
Your use of classical conditioning is impressive.
Using a bell sound to control people's minds, like the name of your book, Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
I noticed today when I heard the bell, when I heard a bell like on your show, I thought of your book, Well Played, Sir.
Well Played.
Pretty sure I said that name while I was reading the question.
Did I? Oh, there it is.
There it is.
Everybody have a good weekend.
I'll see you on Monday.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe.
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Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our technical director is Austin Stevens, supervising producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, production manager Pavel Vidovsky, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup by Nika Geneva, and production coordinator McKenna Waters.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
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