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July 2, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:37
Ep. 798 - Science Is Dead. (And We Have Killed It.)

The Department of Energy pushes racial science, a squish Republican takes a spot on the “1/6 Commission,” and “Speechless” becomes a #1 national bestseller! My new book ’Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds,’ is now available wherever books are sold. Grab your copy today here: https://utm.io/udtMJ  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A top-trending article in USA Today makes a bold claim.
Claim is, conservatives want to ban transgender athletes from girls' sports.
Now, that, obviously, is not the controversial part.
The controversial part is the next sentence.
Their evidence is shaky.
Our evidence, of course, is that they're not girls.
That's our whole evidence.
But these guys here don't understand what evidence or science or arguments are.
Which may be why President Biden's Energy Department is turning its scientific grants into a racial grievance contest.
Might be why scientific conferences now charge different prices based on race.
Might be why Joe Biden himself blames the sun monster for a tragic building collapse in Florida.
I'm expert scientist Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment from Aslan Mitchell says, if Daily Wire ever needs to rename its shows, I propose the following.
Facts with Ben Shapiro, the apocalypse with Andrew Klavan, the bad news with Matt Walsh, and I told you so with Michael Knowles.
Oh, you're so right.
Actually, you're so right because you realized that I was so right, and we're going to get into that today.
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Conservatives want to ban transgender athletes from girls' sports.
Their evidence is shaky.
What do you think our evidence is?
Now, what they mean, I want to be charitable.
I don't want to just strawman this article.
It's a very thick article.
I can't believe they wrote this much about this obvious topic.
Their evidence, they say, is that some of the men who...
But when we say transgender people, by the way, we mean men who are pretending to be women...
Some of the men, you know, actually don't necessarily have this perfect advantage because of this level of hormones.
I mean, just as a practical matter, they almost always win the sports.
But, you know, but actually the testosterone level is this, and because of that, that's not our evidence.
That's not our evidence.
The reason that men should not compete in girls' sports is not because they have an extra bit of testosterone or their shoulders are broader or their hips are narrower or they're taller or they're faster.
The reason, the most basic reason...
Is that they're not girls, and girls' sports, by definition, are for girls.
So if you're not a girl, you shouldn't compete.
You don't need to take any measurements.
You don't need to draw any blood.
You don't need to do any difficult calculations to understand that bit of evidence and that argument.
But what the left does, because it is now so scientistic, is that it doesn't understand What an argument is.
It doesn't understand what philosophy is.
It doesn't understand what arguments from human nature are.
All it understands is this very sort of rigorous materialist physical process.
That then they kind of totally pervert in this way.
I mean, just from a scientific perspective, Husky Hank is going to run faster than sweet little Helen, okay?
That's just a fact.
I don't need advanced degrees to know that.
Only a scientist, only an intellectual, could possibly think that that's a confusing or complicated question.
But science, because it has been made into this idol by the left, it has to fulfill all the roles of philosophy, of religion, of the longings of the human heart, and so it gets perverted all the time.
The Department of Energy right now, under Joe Biden, the Department of Energy makes certain grants, right?
So this is from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
They're making different funding grants.
They are encouraging racial minorities, women, and veterans to become the prime applicants or a proposed partner to the prime applicant.
What that means is the selection official may consider the inclusion of these types of entities as part of the selection.
All of that is bureaucratic gobbledygook to say that this ostensibly scientific endeavor is going to prioritize Black people and Hispanics and maybe Asians, but probably not.
And it's going to disadvantage white people.
But I thought this was a scientific process.
I thought we were just only after the truth.
I thought only the best scientists would win.
Why are we now saying that it's more important that you have, let's say, you've got all things being equal.
A white scientist and a black scientist.
It's going to have to go to the black scientist.
Even further, let's say all things being equal, you've got a black scientist who is performing at a lower rate, and you've got a white scientist performing at a higher rate, you'll still, in some cases, give the grant to the black scientist because of this racial ideology.
What's the evidence there?
It's not.
You're making a moral argument that it's better to reward black people than white people, even if the black people are not performing as well.
Okay, you can try to make that argument, fair enough, but there's nothing scientific about it.
We're just using that word science to mean everything.
In the same way that now we refer to white supremacy as just a synonym for sin.
Every bad thing that's ever happened is because of white supremacy now because we just don't understand how to think about philosophy or religion or morality.
It's the same thing here now in science.
Everything good and true and beautiful in the world is just science because it's a substitute for God because the left makes an idol out of it.
But this is not particularly scientific.
There's a marine science conference right now called the POC-C-S-E-A 2021 conference.
It's a virtual conference for the marine science BIPOC community.
BIPOC is the new term for black people.
And they include indigenous in there too, which means Indians.
Feather, not dot.
So they're going to let the BIPOC in for free, and they're going to charge white scientists $10 to show up as an ally.
So obviously the point here is not scientific inquiry.
The point here is not to discover truth.
The point is to create a racial caste system, to treat white people as a sort of second-class citizen, certainly in the scientific endeavor, and to treat BIPOC Whatever that is, you know, to treat BIPOC as a first-class citizen within the scientific endeavor.
Not science.
It's a new political order.
It's a new caste system.
It's deeply ideological, but it's not science.
What about this terrible building collapse in Florida?
What caused the building collapse?
Well, obviously, people ignoring some warning signs, not doing some work on the building itself, not doing upkeep and maintenance.
Or...
Says President Biden, not even just one of his lackeys, but President Biden himself.
It was probably caused by climate change.
We don't have any firm proof of what's happened.
There's all kinds of rational speculation about whether or not rebars were rusted.
And interesting to me, I didn't raise it.
But how many of the survivors and how many of the families talked about the impact of global warming?
They didn't know exactly, but they talked about sea levels rising and the combination of that and the concern about incoming tropical storms.
Global warming, which is also, by the way, an unscientific theory.
Unscientific in the sense that it can't be disproven.
The temperature goes up, it's global warming.
Temperature goes down.
Well, now they call it climate change.
Temperature goes up, it's climate change.
Temperature goes down, it's climate change.
Temperature stays the same, it's climate change.
You can't deny it.
It's the same argument from Ibram Kendi and those guys on the race-hustling left.
They'll say, if you admit that you're a racist, you're a racist.
If you deny that you're a racist, you're definitely a racist, so you're just a racist.
It's called begging the question.
It's called assuming your own conclusion, which is a philosophical error and a scientific one as well.
You can't begin and end in the same place because you began in that place.
That is not how the inquiry works.
This is why I think People do not trust the scientists because the scientists do not really understand what science is.
The people, scientists and the people who are popularizing science, they don't understand even what arguments we're making, whether it's on transgender sports or infrastructure, which is what's going on in this building collapse, or the pursuit of science itself.
This is why, by the way, a lot of people are hesitant to get the vaccine.
I really don't want to get the stupid thing.
I'm probably going to because my best friend is having a wedding overseas.
I probably have to do it because I love my friend.
I'm willing to do it.
Otherwise, I would be hesitant to do it because I'm a young person and I'm noticing I'm not at risk.
I'm at very, very low risk for them, so I'm making a prudential judgment.
And I know that the scientists have been lying to me from the beginning.
And the people who are reporting on the science have been either lying outright or misunderstanding what the science is.
We've made an idol out of this thing.
And we're using it to justify all sorts of ideological nonsense, whether it's redefining the sexes, whether it's creating a racial caste system, or whether it's upending the political order in the economy on climate change, because we're blaming every tragedy in the world on that.
Absolutely crazy stuff.
Makes you just want to tune out.
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A topic that I keep coming back to when I think about how we're so misunderstanding America, we're so misunderstanding science, we're so misunderstanding, we just don't, we don't even know what we don't know.
Yesterday on the show, we talked about Don Rumsfeld, the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns, and even the known unknowns.
No, the unknown knowns.
It's very, very confusing, you understand.
But we can't, we can't even make sense of those things because our standards have fallen.
And no one possesses really a liberal education anymore, a proper education to know about our culture, to make sense of our own freedom, and to liberate ourselves from our basest passions and our ignorance.
One guy wants to change that.
Glenn Youngkin.
He is a candidate for governor of Virginia.
he is outlining a plan to, quote, restore an academic standard of excellence in Virginia schools and return common sense to the classroom.
I'm going to pause it there.
This is really good stuff.
Too often you hear conservatives prattling on about the free marketplace of ideas in a fifth grade classroom or how we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't indoctrinate.
We need to educate and we need to expand the curriculum and include everything.
No, bogus, not true.
You can't expand a curriculum.
It's not possible.
There are only so many weeks in a semester.
There are only so many books you can read.
Some things are true, some things are false.
We should not include false things.
Some things are good, some things are bad.
We should not include bad things.
We should, as Governor DeSantis is doing now in Florida, teach on the evils of communism.
I'm not saying don't teach Marx or don't teach communism.
I just wrote a whole book outlining a lot of what Marx and his ideological heirs had to say.
But it's bad.
We must have a perspective on these things.
That is the way education works.
So I love that Glenn Youngkin is using this word standards.
It's not just total free academic freedom, whatever you want, pursue whatever you want.
No.
There are standards.
Now there's a big movement on the left.
Get rid of standardized tests.
Why?
Because we want to increase the number of people of color, BIPOC, I guess, in the universities, and if they're doing relatively poorly on the standardized tests, that must mean there's a problem with the standardized tests, so you've got to get rid of it.
That's what's going on.
So what the Virginia governor candidate is saying is, we need a standard of excellence.
Now, here's the one problem I have with the statement.
He says, we need to restore an academic standard of excellence in Virginia schools and return common sense to the classroom.
Here's the problem.
So that children are taught how to think instead of what to think.
No.
No, I'm afraid not.
I don't want to knock this guy too much because I think he's doing really good stuff and I think he's a good candidate, but that is a meaningless expression.
You cannot know how to think if you do not, in some sense, know what to think.
You can't know how to think about advanced mathematics if you don't know that 2 plus 2 equals 4.
You can't know how to think about American history if you don't know that the revolution begins in 1776.
You need to know certain hard facts and you need to be told...
That they are true.
And if you think that they're false, you need to be punished with a bad grade.
We want to educate, not indoctrinate.
The words mean the same thing.
It's just one is good and one is bad.
They have those connotations.
We need to go further.
I'm glad we've moved from the The insane sort of liberal canard of free marketplace of ideas, academic freedom, which the left has never in practice really believed in.
It's just a trick to fool conservatives into abandoning our standards.
We move from that into we need academic standards of excellence.
Cool.
Awesome.
Love that.
Now we need to move further into we will tell, in some ways, students what to think.
You have to.
That is just what education is.
I'm not saying it's got to be agitprop and brainwashing.
I'm not suggesting that at all.
But you need to establish a kind of baseline.
Because when you present facts to students...
Those facts imply certain things about the good and the true and the beautiful.
Okay, speaking of which, since this is the thesis of my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
No more bells.
We're rid of the bells.
I just want to thank all of the readers.
You readers made Speechless, the number one best-selling nonfiction book in the entire country last week.
I'm really floored.
I'm really pleased.
Thank you so much.
I thought the book would sell well because I've been shilling it relentlessly for about six months, as you well know.
Ding, ding, ding.
But I really did not expect it to hit number one.
It is number one on the Publisher Weekly chart, making it a number one national bestseller.
The Publisher Weekly chart is the one tied to book sales.
And sometimes people will buy books in bulk.
That's not what we did.
We did not do any bulk sales.
It was all you guys flooding Tim Pool's Super Chats and ordering your copies.
So thank you so much.
We conspicuously, even though we are the top-selling book in the country right now in nonfiction, conspicuously we're missing from the New York Times list.
So shocking, isn't it?
Almost as though that's...
Part of the thesis of my book.
But I do want to thank you because we've sold, according to BookScan, which is the industry standard, according to Publishers Weekly, we sold about 18,000 copies, just a little under that, in a week.
That's way ahead of the second and third place books, which were by Bill O'Reilly and Malcolm Gladwell.
They sold...
13,000 and 9,000 roughly respectively.
So about 5,000 more than number two, even though that number two is number one on the New York Times list.
And we sold many multiples more than some of the lower books on the New York Times list.
So I'm just really pleased with that.
Thank you so much.
Keep telling your friends because I'm hoping that through the book we can...
Change the conversation on a lot of...
I think the right is doing a good job.
We're starting to give up some of those losing strategies.
We're starting to give up some of the canards and the lies that the left tricked us into believing.
But I want to take it a little bit further as we head into 2022, 2024.
And hopefully, time is running out a little bit here.
Hopefully, we can grab a little political power back.
Which reminds me of the squishes.
I have, you know, my book is really not so much geared at the evils of the left as it is at the just cowardice of the squishes.
It's just the squishes are driving me nuts.
And Liz Cheney did it again.
She did it again.
You know, Liz Cheney, who was formerly one of the Republican leaders, she was chairman of the House GOP conference.
Then she just relentlessly attacked the right, relentlessly attacked Trump.
They took a vote.
They held her in for a while.
Then finally they couldn't defend her anymore.
It's like she's auditioning for her CNN contributorship.
And so they voted her out.
And now she is accepting a spot.
Nancy Pelosi's select committee to investigate January 6th, the gravest, most horrific attack, frankly, in our nation's history.
Forget September 11th.
Forget Pearl Harbor.
Forget the War of 1812.
The guy in the horn helmet dancing on Nancy Pelosi's desk.
By the way, I'm not just making this up.
This is what they're saying.
It's so offensive that they're comparing the guy in the horn hat or the other guy taking Pelosi's lectern to September 11th or Pearl Harbor.
Absolutely insane.
By the way, that's why they're calling it January 6th, is to make it seem like September 11th, even though the two events are completely incomparable.
And Liz Cheney is taking a spot here.
So Kevin McCarthy, who's the House Minority Leader, he issued a threat And he said that he would strip any Republican member of their committee assignments if they accept an offer from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve on this committee.
So you've got a couple people.
You've got Cheney and you've got Kinzinger, who's this other total squish, who said, well, that's why I don't care.
We need to serve on the committee.
That's not who we are.
Whatever nonsense they say.
And so they're going to do that.
This is worse than Democrats.
It is worse.
People point out, I have pointed out, that Liz Cheney has quite a conservative voting record.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if when the tough political issues come up, the actual fights for practical power, not your view on an issue in the abstract, not your own ideological musings in your dorm room, but actually when it comes down to practical, who's got the political power here?
If you're now always siding with the Democrats, that makes you worse than a You're a traitor to your party and to your constituents.
So it's a really, really big problem.
We've got to get these guys out of the party.
It's too bad.
Liz Cheney's got a lot of good views on a lot of good things.
But when it comes to the practice of power, she's just always wrong in undermining the GOP these days.
Some people say, you know, Trump was terrible for the Republican Party.
We need to get back to the true conservatives like Adam Kinzinger.
Who is that?
What?
I've only ever heard that guy's name in the context of criticizing Republicans and conservatives.
This reminds me that Trump, for all his flaws, has been much, much better for the Republican Party than Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, the future MSNBC contributor, or any of these other jokers.
And actually some polls bear this out.
We now know, according to Pew Research, President Trump boosted his support among Hispanics in the 2020 election.
And fairly significantly, by the way.
So, Trump won just 3 in 10 college-educated Hispanics.
That's too bad.
But he won 41% of non-college-educated Hispanics.
Now, that's compared to Joe Biden's 55%, so that's no good.
Unfortunately, with Trump, though, he took a hit among non-college-educated whites.
So, they only backed him 66% in 2020.
That's compared to 73% in 2016.
And then, especially when you get to non-college educated white men.
That's the real problem.
Because it's not even just non-college educated whites generally.
It's the non-college educated white men.
That was a real base.
And Trump kind of moved away from that base.
And he embraced certain things that were a little more liberal or seemed a little bit more pandering.
I'm thinking of the First Step Act.
I'm thinking of a number of policies that did not...
You want to make gains among all sorts of groups.
And, you know, Trump did a pretty good job among minority voters compared to previous Republicans.
But you can't do that at the expense of losing your base.
You know, that sort of is the Trump base.
And that, I think of, you know, Trump famously said, we love the undereducated.
We love the uneducated.
People made fun of him for it.
No, this is very important.
The parents showing up to the school board meetings right now, demanding that CRT and transgenderism get out of the schools, they may be less educated.
They may have fewer degrees than the people running the educational institutions, but they're much smarter.
They're much, much smarter.
I want my country to be run by those people, not by the people running the various educational institutions, okay?
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There is a really rough crime story out right now.
I don't focus on individual crime stories too often, but this one is pretty sick stuff.
Joel Arseniega Sames, a 25-year-old illegal alien, was indicted by a grand jury this week because he was arrested for murdering 51-year-old James Garcia in New Mexico the day after Father's Day.
He decapitated Garcia, then mutilated the rest of his body, and then started kicking his head around like a soccer ball.
The reason I bring it up is not just the gruesome details.
It's because at the time of the murder, Arcianega Sands was out on bail.
He had previously been arrested.
And they just let him out on bail.
Because, you see, we need criminal justice reform.
We need the First Step Act.
We need a Second Step Act.
We need to let these people out of prison.
We need to abolish prisons, darn it.
That's what I've been told.
Prisons are the modern-day slavery, is what I've been told.
But then the problem is when you let out the prisoners, when you let out the criminals, they decapitate people and kick their heads around like soccer balls.
Do you think that's good?
Do you think it's for justice?
Do you think that's increasing equality and flourishing and liberty in the country?
I don't think it is.
I don't think it is at all.
I noticed this yesterday.
Bill Cosby got out on a technicality, you saw that, and everyone was complaining about this.
Fair enough.
But I thought we were supposed to abolish prisons.
I thought there were too many black men in prison.
Remember, that's explicitly in a racial appeal.
Prisons are the new Jim Crow or something.
Black man got out of prison.
Isn't that good?
Well, no, it's bad.
Why is it bad?
Because it's Bill Cosby.
But if we abolish prisons, we have nowhere to put Bill Cosby, even if we got to keep him in jail.
The theory of this, that what we're being told in theory and sold in theory, seems a little bit different when you read the stories of guys kicking people's heads around or rapists going free or whatever you want to read.
Crime of all sorts going up, including attacks on cops.
Attacks on cops are going up 91%, according to the National Fraternal Order of Police.
91% since 2020.
That's not playing very well in Peoria.
So Jen Psaki, on behalf of Biden and the White House and the Democrats, is really denying this.
She's gaslighting everyone.
She's said this before.
She said, Republicans are the ones who want to defund the police because they didn't vote for some spending bill, right?
So it's such preposterous thinking.
Democrats come out and say, we need to abolish the police.
It means getting rid of the police departments.
We at least need to defund them.
They start actually doing that in various cities.
Then that hurts their poll numbers.
So now Psaki blames Republicans for this on the flimsy excuse that they didn't vote for some random spending bill from the federal government.
So Peter Doocy at Fox News, really good reporter, starts pushing her on this.
He says, can you name the Republicans who have voted to defund the police, who have supported that?
Psaki comes up short.
You mentioned at the last briefing that you think Republicans wanted to defund the police because they did not support the American Rescue Plan.
Which Republican ever said that they did not like the American Rescue Plan because they wanted to defund the police?
Well, first let me just note that the President ran and won the most votes of any candidate in history on a platform of boosting funding for law enforcement.
After Republicans spent decades trying to cut the COPS program.
There's record of that.
That doesn't require anyone having new comments.
And then also stood in the way of crucial funding needed to prevent the laying off of police officers as crimes increased.
That's a simple statement of fact.
That's a simple statement of fact.
That's because they didn't...
Come on.
Come on, Jen.
You could do better than that.
Peter Doocy hits the nail on the head.
He says, okay, if you're going to try to make this silly argument...
Just name me one Republican who wants to defund the police.
Because I could name you a bunch of Democrats.
AOC, Ilhan Omar, you know, this, that, and the other thing.
The whole squad, I guess, and more as well.
Certainly when you get to the state and local level.
Name me one Republican.
They can't.
So they obfuscate and they try to make false equivalences.
False equivalence is really a big issue right now.
And I hope that if people take nothing from my book, Speechless, I hope they take this idea that false equivalence is a tool of the left.
The supposedly neutral liberal ground is a secular ground.
It's a tool of the left.
You actually can know things.
I was reminded of this when Lil Nas X, who is that Satanist homosexual rap singer, the one who did the whole video twerking on Satan's face because he came out of the closet as gay.
He also came out of the closet as a Satanist selling shoes with human blood in them.
That's not good.
That's not good at all.
He showed up to an award show.
Wearing a big dress that compared the Catholic Church to the Nazis.
He showed up to the 2021 BET Awards on Sunday with a dress that said Deus Land, which was a reference to Deutschland, but it was Deus Land and had kind of Nazi imagery on it.
Somebody brought up school prayer on the show the other day.
They brought it up actually on Twitter.
I said, I'm in favor of school prayer.
Someone said, what if I want to have a prayer to Satan?
Would you support that?
I said, no, I would not support that, but I would support a prayer to God.
They said to me, how can you support a prayer to God?
School in the morning, like we had in this country for most of its history until the 1960s.
How can you support a prayer to God in schools, but then say we can't have a prayer to Satan?
And my answer is, because God and Satan are different.
They're very different things.
Well, what if my God is Satan?
Well, then you're in trouble, Buster.
You better stop that.
That's not good.
But come on, you know, it's like they're both supernatural beings.
Okay, yeah, sure, but they're different.
Just like natural beings can be different.
This microphone is different than this leftist-tears tumbler.
We can make distinctions.
And I'm not just talking here about Lil Nas X or the school prayer.
You see this really with David French's argument on Drag Queen Story Hour.
He says that if we can't tell perverts that they can't twerk for kids in the library, then they might tell us that we can't go to church on Sunday, which frankly they're already doing, and they've been doing it for a year and a half.
Which, by the way, if we cannot state that Drag Queen Story Hour is different and worse than going to church on Sunday...
We can't govern ourselves.
Self-government requires that we have faculties of reason and moral conscience.
If we don't have that, if we actually can't tell the difference between drag queen story hour and church on Sunday, if we can't tell the difference between God and Satan, then we can't tell the difference between good and bad and right and wrong and true and false.
And so we've got to give up self-government, which increasingly we're doing to the Fauci's of the world.
And that's too bad.
That's really, really too bad.
I like self-government.
I like our constitutional system.
I want to keep it, okay?
Because a lot of men fought for this country.
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This episode focuses on the pioneer of blind flying and recipient of the Medal of Honor, Jimmy Doolittle, who thundered into the Tokyo skies, seemingly out of nowhere, to lead an airborne raid designed to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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We'll be right back with the mailbag.
All right.
First question from Kay.
Hey Michael, can you describe what terrible beliefs Noam Chomsky holds and why he's a scumbag, pinko, commie, trash, lefty?
Thank you.
I think you've done a fair enough job at that, Kay.
Noam Chomsky is a very famous leftist intellectual, and you can still watch a lot of his debates.
So much of it has to do with the Vietnam War.
That's where he really started to find his political voice.
You can see debates between him and Buckley, for instance, and others as well.
I think you're right.
He holds a lot of commie, trash, lefty, pinko views.
But it's worth pointing out with Chomsky.
Chomsky is a linguist.
That's his area of expertise.
And he has very interesting things to say about linguistics.
And I'm very interested in the things he has to say about linguistics.
He's probably best known as a public intellectual for talking about politics, for talking about American imperialism, for talking about aspects of even of our domestic society.
And he's very bad when he's talking about those things.
It is a reminder that just because someone has brilliant insight into one field does not mean that they will have brilliant insight into all fields.
And so I actually, I don't beat up on Chomsky too much because he is genuinely a very intelligent man who has some very interesting things to say about some things.
But he's got really dumb things to say about other things.
And so we got to make sure that we use our prudence and our judgment to know where we should listen to him and where we probably...
From Joe.
Dear Michael, O swarthiest one!
After watching your show from last week about not fighting with pigs because we would both get dirty and they would like it, I decided to stop engaging a leftist friend of mine from our days at our Catholic high school.
The discussions turned into one-sided attacks which ended in her referring to me as leftists often do.
Racist, homophobe, blah blah blah.
If we are not to engage in debate with these people because they never have good intentions, what should we do to possibly help these misguided souls, a fellow sinner?
Well, it depends what kind of debate we're talking about.
If you're talking about the kind of debate that would persuade somebody, That can take different forms.
I always answer people's questions.
I don't go proselytizing all the time, but I always do answer people's questions, even if they're not going to like the answer.
And I do so in a way that I try to employ various rhetorical devices to be more persuasive to them.
There's nothing wrong with that.
You don't need to be flamboyant about everything and have the MAGA hat on and start clubbing your friends and ideological debate partners over the head all the time.
You can try to seduce them with a little bit of honey.
Honey catches more bees than vinegar does.
You don't want to be dishonest, but you do want to use various rhetorical devices.
However, if the purpose of the debate is, let's say it's before an audience, and the debate is really just a clobber the other guy, well, then that's going to involve you using different tools.
You've got to be wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove, not the other way around.
From Cammie.
Hey, Michael.
Love the show.
Love hearing your mailbag advice.
That being said, here we go.
Here's the but.
I have a question.
I'm a woman in my mid-20s, and in today's dating world, I am constantly being told by other girls, if he wanted to, he would.
Meaning that if a guy is interested in you, he will go out of his way to hang out with and make it known no matter what.
My brothers have told me they hate that phrase because it is not an absolute, and guys can have insecurities and overthink things too.
This isn't to say that a guy shouldn't pursue you, but sometimes it might be more than if he wanted to.
I would love to hear your opinion on this.
Sincerely, a woman needs a man like jelly needs peanut butter.
Not needed, but much better together.
Your brothers are right.
Actually, I think my mailbag is good evidence of this.
How many times do I get letters in from young men who say, Michael, how do I talk to a girl?
There's a girl that I like, but I don't know how to talk to her.
There's a girl, how do I go up to her?
What do I say?
What do I do?
Yeah, I mean, this has always been true throughout all of history, and I think this may especially be true now, because men are extremely confused by feminism, and they're told that traditionally masculine virtues and behaviors are toxic and poisonous, and they shouldn't engage in them.
So they're very confused.
The idea that a man...
I think it's perfectly right for women to express their interest in a man.
You know, this doesn't mean you're going to behave exactly like a man would, but it does mean you can, you know, flirt a little bit with the guy, express some sort of interest.
I think it's great.
It was a great relief to me in my younger single days when a woman would express some interest, so I know I'm not going in totally blind, and I suspect it would be even more of a relief to men these days who are even more confused by the madness of feminism and modernity.
From Brandon.
Dear Michael, mostly peaceful podcaster.
My question is in regard to Christianity.
I became a Christian roughly three years ago and have worked hard to strengthen my faith.
I'm by nature a very skeptical person, which has presented many obstacles for me along the way with being confident in my beliefs.
I'm going to pause it right there.
Forget who said this.
It was either Ronald Knox or Fulton Sheen or John Henry Newman.
I don't remember.
I always confuse all of their quotes.
The line is this.
Ten thousand questions do not make one doubt.
Yes, you can have problems.
You can have questions.
You're not quite get it.
That is part of faith.
I mean, by definition, you can't comprehend God.
If you could, he wouldn't be God.
So that's fine, and I think grappling with these things intellectually will ultimately strengthen your faith if you continue to grapple with them.
Okay, you go on.
The biggest hurdle that I can't seem to quite get around is the idea that there are people who practice other religions, Islam to be specific, that feel just as confident in their religion as we do in ours.
Understanding that both of these cannot be true, how do you gain confidence in the Gospels and in your faith more specifically knowing that others out there feel just as convicted?
Okay.
Okay.
I have a few things to say about this.
One...
I assume you're a conservative.
Not everyone who listens to this show is conservative.
We have a strong, healthy number of liberals, moderates, and even some leftists who listen.
But statistically speaking, you're likely to be more on the conservative side of the aisle.
But half the country doesn't agree with you, and they're just as strong in their convictions as you are in yours.
So does that mean that you can't possibly be right because people disagree with you about politics?
No, obviously not.
So if you believe that politics...
It has some kind of objective standard.
People can be right or wrong.
Some things are true, some things are false.
Why do you not believe that about religion?
I suppose you might not believe that about religion because we're told today that religion is just a sort of subjective feeling or value or preference.
And it's just a kind of quirk of history.
And so back in the day people believed this, now people believe this, soon someday they'll believe this next thing.
It's just kind of a weird facet of human nature.
But that's not true.
Religion is the fundament.
It's the basis of all knowledge and all human society.
So some things, just like in politics, because all politics ultimately is theological, some things are going to be true, some things are going to be false, some things are going to be good, some things are going to be bad.
Now in the case of Islam, I want to be careful here, because I have a great deal of respect for practicing Muslims, and I find that I can speak to practicing Muslims in a much deeper way than I can speak to your average, decadent, secular lib atheist.
Because the practicing Muslims believe in God.
They at least accept that basis of reality.
Whereas the kind of decadent, apathetic, modern libs, they just say, like, I don't know, I just want to buy stuff and, you know...
Sleep around and just, I don't know, pleasure myself.
I have a great deal of respect for Muslims.
However, I have religious disagreements with Muslims.
A basic one would be, Well, I suppose just in the history of religion, Islam develops as an historical circumstance because Muhammad has an encounter with a heretical Christian monk.
The heretical Christian monk is known as Bahira in the Arabic tradition and Sergius in the Western tradition.
And nobody denies that this guy existed.
And then sometime later, Muhammad develops Islam.
Muslims believe as a revealed religion.
Christians believe as a Christian heresy.
And you can see the many ways in which it has similarities to other Christian heresies, notably denying the divinity of Christ, though admiring him in some ways.
In its belief in the total transcendence of God, of Allah, that God is pure will, Christianity believes that God is logos, God is the divine logic of the universe.
In Islam, they believe that Allah is pure will, and Pope Benedict XVI in the wonderful Regensburg Address quotes Ibn Hazm as describing this distinction.
So that would be one difference that I think is just not tenable.
I think that's why Islam kind of falls apart when you really start to prod it, whereas Christianity holds up.
The The other aspects here, I think, is if you engage with the person of Christ, I think you find that he is who he says he is, and therefore he cannot be the presentation of him in Islam or any of the other religions or any of the other heretical Christian sects or anything else.
So, What you need to do is recognize that just as you would in a scientific pursuit, you know, we were talking about the evidence that men are not women earlier, just as you would in a political pursuit, the idea that some things are good and bad and more efficient and less efficient in the political sphere, so too you can apply your faculties of reason according to objective reality to the religious sphere.
And I think Christianity wins out.
I say this as a former atheist of 10 years who has studied in some depth...
I've read most of the world religions, read the Quran, you know.
I'm by no means an expert on these things, but I have at least thought about them.
And I was convinced, and you should be too.
From Hallie.
Hello, Mr.
Knowles.
Just got a signed copy of your book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
Can't wait to start reading it.
Thank you, Hallie.
That's great.
My question for you is...
In regard to the claim that racism is built into the foundation of the Constitution and America as a country.
I certainly don't believe that, but I wanted to ask how I would refute this statement when someone uses the example of the Three-Fifths Compromise, which I actually learned in grade school.
Sad how much education has gone downhill.
Love to hear how you would argue against this.
Well, in the case of the Three-Fifths Compromise, this was a compromise when the Constitution was being formed.
And the issue was...
Not as modern liberals present it.
The modern left will say that the proof of America's white supremacy is they believed that blacks were only three-fifths of a person.
And you say, what do you think that means?
Do you think the compromise was the South wanted to believe that blacks were not people at all and then the good, free North wanted to believe that blacks were real people?
Because it was actually the opposite.
It was the South that wanted to count, for purposes of political representation in the House of Representatives, they wanted to count black slaves as full people.
Because then that would grow their population numbers.
The North, and the people who opposed slavery in particular, wanted to count black slaves not as people at all, precisely because they believed in their humanity and they didn't want the South to have disproportionate representation in the federal government.
So they came to this compromise.
At the time of the ratification, there were deep debates over slavery.
First of all, racism is a word that doesn't mean anything anymore.
If it means not having antipathy for people of other races, or if it even means not making any judgments based on race of other people, then surely we are the only society in the history of the world that has not been racist.
Every other society, everywhere else in the world, is.
So that's a perfectly wonderful thing about us.
But then why would you hold us, in particular, responsible for racism?
The thing that we uniquely don't engage in.
That would be very, very crazy.
Furthermore, at the time of the Constitution, there were people arguing strenuously against slavery.
Even people who owned slaves.
Because this is a fallen world and we deal with sin and difficult circumstances.
And then we got rid of slavery rather quickly, actually.
Within some decades of the ratification.
What about us?
What are people going to say about us?
We kill a million babies a year.
And it's totally legal and it's fine and we're not even fighting that hard against it.
Is America a rotten, infanticidal place?
Yeah, in some ways, but we're doing our best.
And so the question is, do you love your country?
Do you not love your country?
Do you want to defend your country and improve your country in some ways or not?
I certainly would like to, but the framing is really what matters here.
Final question from Andrew.
Hey, Michael, do you think morality is subjective or objective?
I see an overwhelming amount of people with the mindset that it's subjective, and I personally think that's a dangerous opinion to have because if morality is subjective, then one could morally justify anything.
You're right.
It has to be objective, or there's just no such thing as morality.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you on Monday.
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.
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