Ep. 975 - Biden's Oil & Gas Catastrophe Gets Even Worse
Biden’s energy policy gets even dumber amid record gas prices, Fox News hires a transsexual commentator, and the White House endorses “trans” surgery for kids.
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Gas prices have hit all-time highs and Joe Biden is refusing to allow the oil companies to produce more to ease those prices.
I know, but have no fear, Joe has a solution.
This solution will allow you to save up to $80 per month at the pump and all you've got to do is buy a new electric car.
Under my plan, Now, $80 a month is pretty good.
You have to buy a new car.
Sure, that's expensive.
But $80 a month, that's pretty good.
So, if you bought, say, a Tesla Model X... It's a pretty prominent new electric car.
That costs $106,190 to buy, which is expensive.
But when you factor in the savings of $80 per month, then that car will actually pay for itself in...
1,328 months or roughly 111 years.
So you drive the car for 111 years and then you're fine.
Then you're good.
Thank you, Joe Biden.
You could get a less expensive model if you would prefer.
You don't want to go all the way for the Model X. Okay, you could get a Tesla Model 3.
That costs $45,190.
That means that as long as you drive that car for 47 years, you will really see some real savings at the pump.
And let's say, forget about Tesla.
Look, Michael, Tesla, that's a high-end company.
There's got to be a cheaper electric car.
There is.
There's the absolute cheapest electric car that you could go out and buy.
That's the Nissan Leaf.
That costs $28,425, which means you can start saving money after just 30 short years.
This is great.
You're fine.
Stop blaming Joe Biden.
Unless you want to keep your car.
Unless you want to keep driving your car and not go out and buy a new car.
In which case, tough luck.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from OceanRider68, who says, this is apropos of my speech last night, all Justice Clarence Thomas has to do is declare himself a woman, and he would be the first black female Supreme Court justice.
This would effectively negate the qualifications for the Supreme Court of the current nominee.
That is true.
Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Jackson.
Because she's a black woman to be the first female justice.
Clarence is frankly a sort of ambiguous name anyway.
That would be really delightful.
I hope that he does that.
That would get my blood flowing.
That would make me feel...
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We've got a schizophrenic energy policy right now coming out of the White House.
We've got always a glib and ridiculous energy policy.
Go buy a Tesla.
That's what you're hearing from Biden.
That's what you're hearing from Pete Buttigieg.
But we're also getting an incoherent energy policy beyond the sort of flippant remarks about going out and getting a Model X.
Joe Biden has decided on a policy that actually could temporarily reduce prices at the pump.
That policy will be to release 1 million barrels of oil per day from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
We've had the Strategic Petroleum Reserve since the 1970s.
After there were gas shortages, we decided to stock up on gas.
So we could release that gas.
That would reduce the price at the pump.
American consumption of oil is 20 million barrels of oil per day.
So if you release 1 million barrels of oil per day, okay, that's...
5% of our oil.
That should do something.
How much oil do we have in the Petroleum Reserve?
We have 593.6 million barrels there.
So, Biden has said that he'll do this for up to 180 days.
That would put a serious dent in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but hey, it's there for a reason, so maybe that's what we're going to do.
Okay, I'm not completely knocking the policy, but you do have to wonder, Why doesn't Biden just let U.S. oil producers produce more oil?
This is an artificial problem.
It's not as though the U.S. oil producers are at maximum capacity right now and there's just nothing we can do.
And it's Putin's fault that we can't get any more oil out.
And it's Iran's fault and it's Saudi Arabia's fault.
It's not.
That's not true.
It's Joe Biden's fault that we're not making any more oil.
It's because the moment Joe Biden came into office, he cut it off.
He said, no, we're not going to build more pipelines to ship the oil.
No, we're not going to have new oil and gas leases.
We're going to temporarily suspend them.
He did that right after he took office.
And then more recently, he said that that suspension is going to be indefinite.
So this is an artificial problem created by Joe Biden.
And now it's killing Biden in the polls.
So he's trying to sort of reverse course.
He's even making public statements, castigating the oil companies for not making more oil, the same oil that he said they can't make more of.
Biden just said, quote, They can put those profits to productive use by producing more oils restarting idle wells or producing on sites they are already leasing.
Biden did admit that it takes months, not days, to ramp up production, but he said after he does this strategic release in the meantime, he wants these oil and gas companies to start producing more oil.
And the Democrat line on this is that these oil and gas companies, they're sitting on these really, really productive oil leases.
They just don't want to do anything with it.
They've got 9,000 oil permissions that they can start drilling, and they just don't want to.
These greedy, selfish oil companies, they want more for some reason, even though those 9,000 would be productive.
How stupid do you need to be to notice that oil right now is at all-time highs, and the oil companies for some reason just don't want to make money?
No, that's not what's going on.
It's that the leases that they currently have are not going to be cost-effective.
They're not going to be productive.
They're not going to be profitable.
Another problem here is that sometimes on some of these oil leases, they don't have any way to transport the oil once they pump it out of the ground.
And in part, this is because Joe Biden is killing oil pipelines.
He's okaying oil pipelines for Vladimir Putin.
That's what started the war in Ukraine.
That's even according to the Ukraine president, Vladimir Zelensky.
He said, if you had not taken the sanctions off of Vladimir Putin's Nord Stream 2 oil pipeline, we wouldn't have the war in Ukraine.
So he gives pipelines to Putin, but Biden won't let Americans have the pipelines, which is in part why some of these oil leases are not going to work out.
But that's even besides the point.
If Joe Biden's opinion right now is that the oil and gas companies need to produce more, then okay, give them new leases.
But that's not.
He's arguing two contradictory points at the same time.
Because the issue with the new oil and gas leases is not that it's inefficient or that the oil companies are sitting on old ones.
Joe Biden's argument for not giving the oil companies permission to pump more oil is that it will harm the environment.
It's not some sort of economic efficiency issue here.
It's an environmental issue.
The argument was, we do not want more oil on the old leases, on the new leases, anywhere.
We want to move to clean energy.
We want to power our country on unicorn tears and rainbows.
That was the argument.
So now he's trying to have it both ways.
Oil companies, every gallon you pump out of the ground is destroying the earth, and so we're going to stop you from doing it.
But also, what the hell's wrong with you?
You got record profits.
Pump more out of the earth.
But we're not going to give you the tools to actually pump it out of the earth.
Well, now we're going to release it from the petroleum reserve.
Well, guess what?
When you burn oil from the petroleum reserve, it's just as bad for the environment as when you pump more oil.
So it's just like so much else of the Biden administration.
This is completely incoherent.
They want to have their cake and eat it too.
And the effect of that, the practical effect of that is meaninglessness.
The practical effect of that is they're not doing anything productive at all.
Totally incoherent.
And speaking of incoherence in the Biden administration, our vice president, our vice president, Kamala Harris, has just attempted to explain economics, economics specifically with regard to Jamaica.
Please tell me if you can decipher this.
We also recognize, just as it has been in the United States for Jamaica, one of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic in the way of its impact has been the pandemic.
So to that end, we are announcing today also that we will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential to, I believe, what is necessary for Ben,
Ben, why did you not pack the bong in the travel kit so that I could understand what the vice president had to say?
Why?
This is so unprofessional.
I have a Kamala Bang in my desk for a reason.
Because when she comes out and she says things like, the economic recovery is designed for the recovery of, in Jamaica and especially for the economy...
And we must do what we've been doing, and the time to do what we do is now to be doing.
I have the bong so that I can try to understand what the vice president is saying.
But now I can't.
Frankly, I probably couldn't, even with the bong.
I am not in the studio right now.
I am just outside of a college campus.
I was speaking at Washburn University last night.
This was for Trans Visibility Day.
The thrust of my speech was why conservatives need to completely stop tolerating transgenderism in all of its forms everywhere for everyone.
This excited some of the leftists on campus.
There was a massive protest before my speech, and it wasn't just protests from the Washburn community.
It was protests from surrounding schools.
There was actually a professor at the University of Kansas who encouraged her students to come protest me.
You want to talk about incoherence?
We'll get to what was said at this protest in just a second.
First, though, it's very important to listen to the people that we talk to.
It's very important to have respectful and civil dialogue.
There was a lot of shouting at this protest last night.
Thank you.
Thank you.
A birthday message from one of her least favorite conservative celebs.
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Go to the Apple App Store or Google Play, download the Shout Out app, and you can easily go in there and get your favorite conservative celebs to send that personalized greeting for whatever it is.
The birthday, it's a bachelor party, whatever you want.
Head on over, get the Shout Out app today.
Jennifer Raff, a professor at the University of Kansas, She encouraged her students to show up to my speech last night at Washburn University, not to listen to the speech, not to go in, she didn't encourage that at all, but to protest me outside of the speech.
She said, hey Jayhawks, Let's show our support for our neighbors at Washburn today at 4.30, hashtag ending this transphobic madness.
This is a professor, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, extremely unprofessional.
Can you imagine what her students must think?
Certainly her conservative students or her Republican students, but I suspect the vast majority of her students.
Because the transgender issue is not just a left versus right, Republican versus Democrat kind of issue.
More than half the country knows that men aren't women.
I suspect the vast, vast majority of the country knows that men and women are different.
This transgenderism issue is an issue that is believed by, I would estimate, 10 to...
20 or 30% of the country at most on being as charitable as I can.
But it's an issue that's believed by 100% of the ruling class.
So you have this huge disparity here.
And this professor is basically saying, if you believe that boys and girls are different, then you're a terrible, awful person and we are going to protest you.
I, your professor, am going to go protest you.
There was a massive protest before my speech.
And then the speech went off without a hitch.
I actually ended up speaking to the organizer of one of the protests, who was a confused young lady but perfectly polite.
I think the room last night held about 350 people.
That was the only downside of the speech, because there were, I think, a couple hundred people who were outside who ended up streaming the speech on their phones outside of the room.
But it was a really wonderful crowd, really respectful.
There were great questions.
I spoke to one young woman.
She came up during the question session, and she said, I was really confused.
I was secretly binding my body parts.
I was going through the process of transitioning.
And then I was diagnosed with autism.
And when people began to treat that as my condition, my gender dysphoria went away.
Thank God I wasn't brought into this crazy world of transitioning with the hormones and the butchery and the mutilation.
Thank God I had a good family and a good church that reminded me that I'm not actually a man, that I am a woman.
And then they diagnosed my actual medical condition.
And so I wasn't led into this horribly destructive ideology of transgenderism.
It was really amazing.
I think we have the clip somewhere on the internet.
We'll try to post it later on.
There are lots of stories like that, specifically with people who were later diagnosed with autism, but with other diagnoses as well that are now confused for this gender dysphoria madness.
So the thrust of my speech was that conservatives have not gone far enough on this issue.
That it's not enough to say, look, if you're a man and you want to live your life as a woman, put on a dress and call yourself Sally.
That's your right.
That's totally fine.
Just don't compete in women's sports.
Just don't do it to kids or whatever way we've tried to split the baby.
I just think that's a losing strategy.
When we live in a society together, we need to agree about the basic facts of society.
Otherwise, we can't have a society.
If we can't agree on the definition of man and woman, we can't communicate.
We can't govern ourselves.
We don't really have a country.
And so we have to reject transgenderism, not just for kids, not just for college swimmers, but for everyone.
Either it's true or it's false.
That's that.
Either the claims are true that your sex and gender can be different and a man can secretly be a woman, or that's not true.
And we all know it's not true.
And so we need to stop tolerating it entirely.
It's not respectful.
It's not loving.
It's not kind to indulge delusions that ultimately are going to harm people even more than they've been harmed already.
So you can check out that speech online.
I think they posted under the provocative title, Banning Transgenderism.
You can find that on YAF TV. But this is being pushed by the elites.
Your professors are trying to get you to buy into this.
Frankly, your kindergarten teachers now are trying to get you to buy into this.
The White House is pushing this, not just for adults even, but for kids as well.
The White House just came out to endorse sex change, quote-unquote, surgeries for kids.
Mutilating the bodies of little kids.
Pumping little kids full of hormones.
This just out from the Office of Population Affairs over at the Department of Health and Human Services.
You can get it on HHS.gov.
Gender-affirming care and young people.
How young are we talking?
We're not talking about 20-year-olds.
We're talking about little children.
You've got social affirmation, puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender-affirming surgeries.
You can read all about their crazy ideas on the website, but just this phrase alone shows you what they're talking about.
Puberty blockers, that they want to give little kids these cross-sex hormones so that they do not develop As they ordinarily would, but become some sort of eunuch or become some kind of cosmetically slightly more similar to the opposite sex person.
This is true quackery.
This is true child abuse.
This should be illegal and the people perpetrating this in our government should go to prison.
This is really hideous stuff.
But why?
Why is it happening?
Why?
Is it because we make these jokes, and I think most people are joking, but I'm not sure, that the reason that they're doing this is because the libs just want to diddle your kids, basically.
Because the libs are creepy pedophiles and they want to just groom your kids for sexual acts.
Maybe that's true in some cases.
I don't know.
But I don't think that explains the majority of this phenomenon.
I think the reason they're doing this is political.
I don't think it's their personal sexual gratification, at least in the vast majority of cases.
I think it's political.
I think they realize that if they can redefine sex, if they can redefine human nature, then they can redefine anything.
if they can shape five-year-olds on some of the most basic aspects of their identity, then they can transform the world.
And that's always what they're after.
They always want to remake the world anew.
The past is always terrible and awful and oppressive.
The present is always a crisis, according to the left.
And the futures are always going to be great, as long as we can make ourselves gods and remake the whole damn world.
So the White House is endorsing this.
Jen Psaki, White House spokesman, just came out furious about bills that won't let predator adults trans the kids.
Bills that we're seeing in Oklahoma.
Bills that we're seeing in Arizona.
She says that these sorts of bills are extreme and harmful.
They're unacceptable and the White House won't stop fighting for the justice and equality of chopping off kids' genitals.
Joe Biden just rolled out gender-neutral passports, quote-unquote.
Seems like a little bit of a national security risk to me, but there you have it.
The State Department is now letting American citizens choose a third sex.
You can be male, you can be female, or you can be X on your passport for people who are neither male nor female.
But those people don't exist.
That's not real.
That's not real.
Even in the exceedingly rare case of sexual or chromosomal or genital ambiguity, sometimes we call this intersex or hermaphroditism, even in that vanishingly rare case, it's not totally ambiguous.
You can still classify someone as male or female.
And frankly, that's not what this X is going to be used for.
The X is not going to be used for the infinitesimally small percentage of people who have sexual ambiguity.
It's going to be used for people who are quote-unquote transgender, where there's no physical ambiguity whatsoever.
We now have on our official identity documents from the federal government that are largely used for national security purposes, Why?
Because of the formerly handful of people, now it's spreading like a social contagion, but the formerly handful of people who suffered from this kind of confusion?
No, it's for the political revolutionary consequences of this, which is eradicating the distinction between men and women, which is something that political leftist radicals have been trying to do for centuries.
And I'm sorry to say it, even putatively conservative institutions are falling into this.
You know I would never criticize Fox News.
I would never do it.
No.
No sir, not me.
Try to get me to do it.
I won't.
However, you know what I'll do?
I'm going to keep opinion completely out of this.
I'm just going to read you what happened.
Fox News has hired Bruce Jenner As Caitlyn Jenner to be a political analyst for the network.
Because apparently the transgender perspective was lacking from the putatively conservative network.
This is the, again, I'm not injecting my opinion, I'm just reading what they said.
This is from the Fox News CEO, Suzanne Scott.
Quote, Caitlin's story is an inspiration to us all.
She is a trailblazer in the LGBTQ plus community, which I guess is a good thing.
And her illustrious career spans a variety of fields that will be an asset, tremendous asset for our audience.
I'm humbled by this unique opportunity to speak directly to Fox News Media's millions of viewers about a range of issues that are important to the American people.
Like transgender, like the affirmation of transgenderism.
With conservatives like this, one wonders why we have a need of liberals.
In Fox's defense, by the way, it would appear that Fox has been telling the truth.
Fox says, I'm not a conservative network.
We're not pushing conservatism.
We're fair and balanced.
We're sort of a centrist network.
And the left always made fun of them for saying this and saying, no, you're not.
You're a far-right network.
You're not centrist.
You're not fair and balanced.
Well, I think they're...
I don't know about...
I don't know about whatever slogan you want to use, but it would seem that they're a more centrist network that has a lot of Democrats on the payroll and is now presenting very radical far-left ideologies like transgenderism in a way that is affirming those ideologies, using pronouns, she, to refer to men who think that they're women.
It's not just the far-left elite established institutions that are pushing this thing.
As I have warned you from the beginning, hate to say I told you so, putting on my Nolstradamus ad here, It's basically, it might be entirely all of the elite established institutions are pushing an ideology that the vast majority of Americans correctly know is completely insane.
Now, speaking of men and women...
Clarence Thomas is in big trouble.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, probably the favorite justice among the conservatives.
The left hates him.
He's the least favorite justice for the leftists.
Well, Aaron Rupar, who formerly was with Vox.com, I think he's an independent left-wing journalist now, he's got the smoking gun.
You see, because Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginny Thomas, is active in conservative politics.
Clarence Thomas is a judge on the Supreme Court.
The left always wants him to recuse himself from cases because Ginny Thomas is involved in politics and Clarence Thomas, he's not allowed to talk about the law if his wife is in politics.
And now they've got a clip of Clarence Thomas admitting in an interview that he relies upon his wife as almost like the other half of his person, almost sort of like part of his one flesh because they're in a marriage together.
And the best part of being a justice?
First of all, it'd be impossible without you.
I have to be honest it would be it's sort of like how do you run with one leg You can't.
It makes it whole when I have my wife.
Ha ha!
We got him!
We got him!
Recuse yourself, Justice Thomas.
You just admitted you love your wife.
Ha ha!
That is a shocking revelation, apparently, to some liberals.
That a man would love his wife, first of all.
That's shocking to some liberals.
But also that a man would speak in these terms.
You're like the other half of me.
Being without you would be like having one leg.
This, I really believe, is shocking to liberals.
I think a lot of liberals will understand that the man loves his wife.
Some won't.
But very few liberals, I suspect, will understand marriage in this way, which is the traditional way.
It's the Christian way, which is that man and woman leave their families and join together, and what God has joined, let no man separate, and they become one flesh.
They really are part of one another.
the libs today conceive of marriage is that it's a contract just like any other contract.
You form an accounting firm with your friend.
Well, that's a contract.
You agree to have a party catered by the local baker.
That's a contract.
And you engage in a marriage.
That's a contract too.
That contract can be dissolved for whatever reason.
You don't need to prove fault.
You can have a no-fault dissolution, no-fault divorce in that marriage if you're no longer being fulfilled, if you no longer really like one another.
You've got totally separate lives.
Often you've got totally separate bank accounts.
You both just pursue your careers however you want, and when the marriage becomes inconvenient, I guess it has to dissolve.
That's the way that the libs conceive of marriage today.
Marriage has nothing to do with sexual complementarity.
Everywhere throughout all of human history, marriage has been understood to involve a husband and a wife.
Now, no longer, just two people.
Because people can sign contracts.
Men and women are basically the same.
That's what transgenderism tells us.
That's what all of the elites tell us now.
So, no big deal.
No big deal, right?
Wrong.
Wrong.
Clarence Thomas is right.
He obviously should not recuse himself for loving his wife and having apparently at least a relatively normal marriage compared to what everyone else in the elite circles has.
They're shocked.
They're absolutely shocked at him.
Speaking of men and women and loyalty, J.D. Vance, who's the author of Hillbilly Elegy, he's running for Senate in Ohio now.
He's running on a much more conservative platform, culturally conservative platform than many other Republicans.
He's in hot water because you see Marjorie Taylor Greene, she spoke at a conference that had all sorts of nasty people at it.
And she didn't say anything wrong at the conference.
No one really objects, but she was associating with people who are mean and nasty and terrible, and so the left basically wants to cancel her and is trying to get anyone who's associated with her to condemn Marjorie Taylor Greene, not for saying anything wrong or doing anything wrong, but appearing in an event that was unsavory.
J.D. Vance refuses to do that.
This highlights something, Karen, that I really don't like that the media does, and they do it to Republicans.
Of course, they never do it to Democrats, which is they play this guilt by association game where they get us to stab our friends in the back, and then we wonder why the left always wins, even though we sometimes win elections because we're constantly stabbing our friends in the back.
The accusation against Marjorie is pretty simple.
That she appeared at a conference where somebody said something bad.
And I asked, did she say something bad at the conference?
I actually watched her remarks.
I agreed with nearly every word that she said.
I hate this about politics.
I was raised by my mamaw.
She's a great woman.
She's from southeastern Kentucky.
She called us hillbillies growing up.
And she told us that the thing that mattered more, more than anything, was loyalty.
There's no business in the world that asks you to stab your friends in the back like politics.
I absolutely refuse to do it to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
She is my friend and she did nothing wrong.
She said nothing wrong and I'm absolutely not going to throw her under the bus or anybody else who's a friend of mine.
I love this response because he's totally ignoring whatever Claims the libs are making.
Whatever guilt by association by association by association claims the libs are making, that Marjorie Taylor Greene.
He's saying, hey, did Marjorie Taylor Greene say something wrong?
No, she didn't.
She just said completely mainstream things.
She just showed up to an event, one event among probably hundreds that she does every year, that because you can have guilt by association, association, association, you're going to try to get me, someone who's sort of associated with her, to condemn her.
No, I don't think I'm going to do that.
No, I don't.
And he says something so important.
People really ought to keep this in mind.
Loyalty matters.
Loyalty matters in your personal life and in politics.
Frankly, it matters...
To a very high degree in both.
It probably matters more in politics.
But there's a great temptation in politics to throw your friends under the bus the first time that it's convenient.
The first time you catch a little heat because your buddy does something wrong.
Your political ally does something wrong.
Or is even accused of doing something wrong.
Then all of a sudden we throw everyone under the bus.
The libs don't have this problem.
The libs stick together.
When they do things that are very wrong, actually, they stick together.
I don't have time to get really into this today.
We'll have to get to it next week, but I'll give you an example of this.
The Hunter Biden laptop was completely real.
The entire liberal establishment said it was completely fake, and they called it disinformation, and they shut it down.
And I would suspect most of them knew that it was real, but they lied, and they all covered up for one another.
The Hunter Biden laptop, which now even the New York Times, even the Washington Post admits is real, shows that not only was he profiting from crooked contracts from the corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs, not only was he profiting all around the world with his father's name, but he was making millions of dollars from China.
Previously, we had been told he didn't actually solve the deal with China, that it was just on the table, but he didn't actually make any money.
No, it turns out the guy made just under five million bucks From the Chinese, from a crooked Chinese energy company between 2017 and 2018.
That was in a retainer and in consulting fees.
And by the way, he was holding big chunks of equity, valuable assets, for his father.
Ten held by H for the big guy.
That's the line that no one wants you to talk about.
We'll get into more of the Hunter Biden laptop next week.
Just a reminder, forget about guilt by association, you showed up to some conference, someone said something at the conference.
We're talking about extraordinarily high-level corruption with national security implications in China, in Ukraine, from Russia, that the son of the president was doing, potentially to benefit the president himself, and the entire liberal media stick together, and it was politically very effective.
So if they're going to do that with things that are extremely unjust and immoral and corrupt, can't we do that when we don't need to?
Do things that are unjust, when we don't need to do things that are corrupt, when we don't need to do things that are immoral, when we just need to stick by our friends and allies in politics.
I think we can.
I believe conservatives can, and I think that we should.
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You know I'm not the biggest sports guy in the world, but I love...
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We will be right back with The Mailbag.
Welcome back to the show.
We are now in my favorite time of the week.
That would be the mailbag.
First question up from Ben.
Hey Michael, my wife and I are in our 20s and are very happy with just the two of us.
We've talked about kids, but neither of us are sure we actually want them.
As Christians, we are obligated, are we obligated, slash called, slash supposed to have children?
We're not sold on having kids, but we also want to live a life and have a marriage pleasing to God.
Thank you for all you do.
We love the show.
That's so wonderful to hear this question.
Thank you for the compliment.
And I love this question in particular because there's a very simple answer.
Yes, have kids.
That's it.
We can move on right now.
Not everyone in a marriage gets to have kids.
A lot of people don't get to have kids.
A lot of people struggle with infertility and it's extremely painful for them.
But everyone in a marriage has an obligation to be open to life.
To be open to being fruitful and to multiplying.
To giving of your love and yourself entirely to the other person, to your spouse, to your other half, without holding anything back.
Yes, you do have that obligation.
I sympathize with you.
I empathize with you, frankly.
Because you're in your 20s and you're having fun and you're going to brunch.
And you're going out and having a good time and you're living that dink lifestyle.
Double income, no kids, potentially.
And you can go on fun vacations and you can go to nice restaurants.
And that's great and it's fun.
And I did it myself in my 20s and it's so great, isn't it?
To not have a lot of responsibilities and to go on and do it.
But two points on that.
One...
Ultimately, that will not be fulfilling.
Ultimately, you'll get sick of the mimosas.
Two, marriage is not just about pleasing yourself.
This is a trap that the libs fall into.
If you believe that the purpose of marriage is just to give yourself a lot of pleasure and then...
And then that's it.
Then what happens when the pleasure runs out?
What happens when they stop refilling the mimosas?
What happens when you get tired of going to the same restaurant for the 500th time?
Then what are you doing?
Marriage is about building something, about coming together and becoming something different than you were.
The man, just like the sperm and the egg, come together and they create something different than they were previously, something totally unique.
The same is true of a marriage.
You leave your family, your wife leaves her family, you come together and you form something new.
It's a new family.
And you do something and you grow.
It's a new family.
Just like that little baby is going to grow in the womb, your family is going to grow.
You may not be able to have kids.
A lot of people are really surprised when they decide, in their 20s they don't want kids, in their 30s they decide we do want kids, and they're shocked to find out that it's harder than it looks.
And maybe they can't have kids.
And then you talk about where to go from there.
I'm not saying everyone is called to that.
I'm not saying everyone's called to marriage for that matter.
But if you are, I would strongly recommend you do the thing.
There is actually no ambiguity on this.
So best of luck.
Have lots of babies.
This is also the other way we're going to beat the libs.
I remember I was a teenager and we saw Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.
He said, Governor Daniels, how do we beat the libs?
He said, well, you can either outfox them, outpersuade them, outmaneuver them in politics.
That's tricky.
They're pretty clever.
Or you can outbreed them.
And I would recommend the latter because the latter is more fun.
So try that.
From Frank, I'm at the point of baptizing my baby, and I was wondering how baptizing a baby is not abuse in the sense that he's not consenting to it.
Maybe he will grow and decide to follow another religion or be an atheist.
Should we wait until he's an adult to baptize him?
Thanks for your time.
I know a lot of people in the audience probably do not agree with infant baptism.
Infant baptism, of course, has been practiced throughout the entire history of the Church going back to its earliest days.
It is found in Scripture when you hear in the Book of Acts, for instance, of whole households being baptized.
It's alluded to, I certainly believe, And it is traditionally understood to be found in scripture when Christ says, let the little children come to me, not just the children who are rational and consent and they're past the age of maturity and they're in their teenage years, but the little children too.
But beyond anyone's qualms with infant baptism, that's actually not the point of this question.
The point of this question is, should I do something to or for my child that he can't consent to?
And the answer to that is, Duh, of course.
Is it morally licit to do something to or for my child without his consent?
Yes, of course.
That's everything you do for your child.
I don't think your child consents to nap time all the time.
I don't think your child probably consents to eating his broccoli.
But you have him do that anyway, because that's what it means to raise a child.
That's what it means to educate someone.
Education is in many ways coercive.
I don't think your child is picking out his clothing.
You are coercing your child to wear his winter jacket when it's snowy outside.
You're making decisions for your child because that child is in your care and you are raising that child.
The same is true in his academic education and certainly true in his religious life.
Even beyond the question of baptism, are you going to take the child to church?
He's not consenting to it.
How do you know that one day he won't decide that he wants to be a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu?
So isn't it wrong to take him to church, spending all of his Sundays at church?
Are you going to read the Bible to your child or have your child read the Bible?
What if he doesn't want to?
What if he wants to end up becoming a Buddhist?
He won't even have that choice if you don't educate him.
This is, even beyond the question of religion, this is one of the paradoxes of education, is that the point of education is to make you free, but the only way to become educated is to be forced to be educated.
The only way to become educated is to get a slap on the wrist, to get bad grades if you don't do your homework, to be forced to do your homework, to be forced to read the book, to be forced to follow the curriculum, even when you'd rather go play outside at recess.
But only through that process of shaping and coercion, let's call it what it is, then one can be free and then one actually can choose.
So then beyond that, there's actually another question raised by this issue, which is, why do you want to baptize your child?
Presumably you want to baptize your child because you believe in Jesus and you think that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life and people who are within the body of Christ have life in them and people who are outside of it don't have life in them and this is the way that your child is going to have eternal life and this is the way that your child is going to be close to his God and you believe it's true and good for him.
Presumably that's why you want it.
I don't think it's just because you want to have a fun lunch after this kind of strange religious ceremony.
No, you want to do it because you think it's true and good.
So then do it.
That's for the good of your child.
Not everything in life is about consent.
It is important that we cultivate our free will and be able to make good decisions.
But there is also just a question of good and bad, and right and wrong, and true and false, for that matter.
And when you're raising a kid, you want to cultivate those things in your child.
You want to cultivate virtue.
You want your child to pursue good.
You want your child to pursue the truth.
You want to have him pursue the things that are right.
And that involves shaping his very will, shaping his desire.
When kids are poorly educated, the effect of that is that their desires are for bad things.
It's not just that they're doing bad things, it's that they're actively desiring those bad things.
This is what happens with addiction.
I don't have any desire for heroin.
I don't.
I'm not saying I don't have desires for bad things.
We all do.
It's a fallen world.
But I don't have any desire for heroin.
I've never done heroin.
I bet if I did heroin right now, I would...
Well, I don't really like needles, so I wouldn't probably like it very much the first time.
But if I did it once, twice, three times, I bet I would start to desire that heroin.
That's called addiction.
And my very desire would be turned for something that was harmful and destructive.
And so you're shaping the desire of your child.
You're shaping the very way that his consent and his free will will work.
All of which is a long way of saying, get your kid baptized.
From Sam, Dear Michael...
I sometimes struggle with overthinking about my past and second-guessing things I did not do or chances I did not take.
I don't want to have regrets in life, so I wanted to ask your advice on how to not have regrets in the future and moving on from having regrets in your past.
Sincerely, no regrets.
Good question, because you're asking about two things.
You're asking about the regrets for the things you did do and regrets for the things you didn't do.
There's a line in Glengarry Glen Ross.
Which, in the movie version, is played by Al Pacino.
And the line is, You regret the things you don't do!
So you regret the things that you don't do, and a lot of people think that that's true.
And I suppose that's true, but you also regret the things that you do do, if those things are wrong and shameful.
We all have regrets for things that we did that we wish we didn't do.
And a great many people regret that.
Regret opportunities that they missed.
Chances they allowed to pass by.
The girl, the one that got away!
A lot of people have those things.
Everyone has those things in one way or another.
How do you move on from it?
Well, one, there is some solace in knowing that that's inevitable.
That's the way this fallen world works.
You're going to screw up.
You're going to regret the things.
You're lucky if you regret the things that you screwed up.
Because it means you've at least had a kind of repentance.
It means you at least have a working moral conscience.
It means at least you have a kind of clarity.
That's good.
Actually, having regrets is the first step on the road to recovery.
And then the question is, what are you going to do about it?
You can't change the past.
You can change the future.
So you can change your behavior.
But then ultimately, at a spiritual level...
You need absolution.
You need redemption.
This is the essence of Christianity.
And so how are you going to do that?
Well, the Christian understanding is that Christ died for your sins and you can be absolved of your sins, all of your sins, even your worst, terrible, blackest sins, if you turn toward Christ and accept him.
And the way I would recommend doing that is receiving the sacraments, joining the church, going to confession, it's like the laundromat for your souls, and going forth and sinning no more.
And then you are going to sin some more, and then you're going to repent again.
And you're going to turn your desire, just like we were talking about in the last question, you're going to turn your desire slowly toward holiness and toward goodness.
That would be my suggestion.
You should actually take comfort in the fact that you have those regrets.
Don't mire in those regrets.
The devil is always trying to pull you back to the past, pull you back to all the terrible things that you've done.
You should actually, in some ways, rejoice when you have those regrets because they're a warning post.
They're a recognition of things you don't want to do again.
And then go seek salvation.
You're not going to get it in and of yourselves.
So you're going to have to find it elsewhere in your God.
No two ways about it.
Sometimes people, I fear that people get a little tired of my religious talk.
Because we're talking about politics, we're talking about culture, we're talking about personal behavior.
Why does it come back to religion so often?
Because all human conflict is theological.
And so if you want these ultimate answers, it's going to have to get to that.
That's been true in every culture, everywhere in the world, for all of human history.
I know that people now, they're really enlightened and they're really smart, and they've got Dr.
Fauci, and they've got science, so they don't need religion.
But those people are big, dumb idiots, and you do.
So if you want the ultimate answers, you're going to have to dig in that deeply.
From Anonymous, okay?
Dear General Knowles, another relationship question for you.
I recently met a nice girl at a local bar.
We hit it off well during the convo.
We realized that we have the same interests and values.
When I asked her if she listens to any podcasts, she immediately brought up The Michael Knowles Show, a refreshing surprise.
I'm going to pause it there.
Marry her.
She's a great girl.
She's smart.
She's got a good head on her shoulders.
She'll raise up great kids.
Okay, I'll finish the question.
We're both Catholic.
We even share the same heritage, half Irish and half Italian.
It's almost too good to be true.
We danced all night and shared more than a few goodnight kisses.
Grrrr!
She seems a bit shy, and I really don't want to mess anything up.
My question for you is, how do I best walk the line between showing her that I'm interested and not coming on too strong?
Sincerely, a military man without a plan this time.
Don't worry, bro.
Come on.
Are you kidding me?
I think you're fine.
You know, don't show up outside her bedroom window with a boombox.
That would be a little aggressive.
But yeah, go ask her out and get some more drinks.
Frankly, it sounds like you really hit it off, so skip the drinks.
Go straight to dinner.
Ask her out on a date.
Go get nice dinner.
Pick up the check.
I probably don't need to tell you this.
You're a military man.
You listen to my show.
You are a man of faith.
I think you would understand this generally.
But, you know, act like a man.
Act like a gentleman.
You don't want to seem desperate.
You're not desperate, but you're interested.
You're eager.
You're attracted to this girl.
You're confident.
Girls like that, okay?
You don't need to worry about playing coy.
You're not a 12-year-old, all right?
You're a man.
You know what you want.
You want the right stuff.
You want to go get it.
Enjoy.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you on Monday.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
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Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
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.
