CNN+ shuts down after just 21 days, Michael gets protested at BU, and Elon shows he’s in it to win it.
NBA star Jonathan Isaac has withstood immense pressure to conform to popular social issues. He’s now writing a book about his experience and is publishing with the Daily Wire. Pre-order your copy now: https://utm.io/ud96e.
I’m exposing the most successful failure in government history. Stream Fauci Unmasked here: https://utm.io/ueogL.
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I flew here yesterday on my first flight since that hero judge struck down the CDC's mask mandate.
And 99% of the people in the airport loved it.
We were happy as a clan.
I would say, I'm just estimating here, 99% of the people in the airport were not wearing masks.
On my flight, even a flight to a liberal city, I would say 95% of the people were not wearing masks.
They were so, so happy.
And the lifting of the mask mandate, the fact that it's now voluntary, allows you to tell with 100% certainty exactly who the libs are on your flight.
And there actually are not a whole lot of them.
Everyone was very, very happy, except for Dr.
Fauci.
I was both surprised and disappointed because those types of things really are the purview of the CDC. This is a public health issue.
And for a court to come in, and if you look at the rationale for that, it really is not particularly firm.
And we are concerned about that, about courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally public health decisions.
I mean, this is a CDC issue.
It should not have been a court issue.
So we're hoping That the inevitable increase in cases which we're seeing are not going to be associated with an increase in hospitalizations.
So all of these dynamic things going on at the same time, it was perfectly logical for the CDC to say, wait a minute, we were planning on ending this mandate on a certain date, let's wait a period of time until May 3rd, which was a very sound public health decision.
I hope you've gotten this by now, but if you haven't, this isn't about the masks.
This isn't about whether or not you should wear the stupid masks.
Dr.
Fauci himself has been the most pro-mask and anti-mask politician in the country.
It's not about the masks.
This is about who governs us.
Dr.
Fauci believes that we should be governed by the whims and caprices of totally unaccountable bureaucrats at the CDC. Normal people believe that we should have some say in our government.
If we're not going to be ruled by the legislature, at the very least we could be ruled by the courts.
Where there's some sort of kind of almost accountability.
Dr.
Fauci is furious.
Not because people are not muzzling themselves anymore, but because, for now at least, he's no longer running the country.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Nett Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Astora Noble, who says, Chris said that Democrat positions become far more popular when they lie about what their position actually is.
That's true, actually.
It was very nice of Chris Hahn to come on the show yesterday.
He is a Democrat.
I wanted to hear out his side.
For the education law in Florida and also the Disney retaliation against the education law and then the Florida Republican retaliation against the Disney retaliation against the education law.
And what Chris said was he really loves the way Democrats have spun this thing because while don't say gay is not an accurate representation of the law, politically it can be useful.
So he's admitting this is cynical and it's not really...
It's not representing what the law does, but it's politically useful.
And my only argument there is, I don't think it is all that politically useful.
I think the majority of Americans, the majority of Floridians, the majority of Democrats even, support the Florida education law.
So I just don't think it worked.
I think the credibility of the left, whether we're talking about the CDC, whether we're talking about Fauci, whether we're talking about the weird groomers at Disney and elsewhere, I just don't think it's there.
I think it's beginning to crack.
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The credibility, the authority of the ruling class is cracking.
That's why Dr.
Fauci is so upset.
He actually had the audacity to say, I only wanted two more weeks.
That's what he said.
Because the mask mandate on the airplanes was supposed to expire on April 18th.
And then he said, look, the CDC, I think very responsibly, said that we just need two more weeks.
Oh, two more weeks, huh?
Where have I heard two more weeks before?
You jerk.
I heard two weeks, two years ago, and then you never gave up your power.
So you know what?
We're going to take the power back from you.
And if we can't even do it through the legislature, then we'll do it through the courts and this hero district judge who struck down the mask mandate.
Great, that's what we're going to do.
Come on, just two more weeks, guys.
No.
People are not buying it anymore.
We're not buying that it's only going to be two weeks.
We're not buying that the masks are going to save us from Armageddon.
We're not buying what Dr.
Fauci is selling.
We're not buying what the liberal establishment is selling broadly.
That's why CNN +, the CNN subscription service, is collapsing.
It's being shut down.
21 days after it started.
21 days!
That's less than two Scaramucci's.
A Scaramucci is a discrete measurement of time.
It's 11 days, the length that Anthony Scaramucci lasted in the White House.
These guys didn't even make it to Scaramucci's.
Warner Brothers' discovery is reportedly, and according to lots of reports, shutting down the new CNN subscription service.
CNBC reported last week fewer than 10,000 people were using CNN Plus on a daily basis.
To put that in perspective, that's...
Gosh, what is that?
Something like 1 30th?
Between 1 30th and 1 50th the number of people who watch and listen to this show every day.
This show, this is a pretty big show, but it's not even the biggest show out there on the internet.
This show is getting between 30 and 50 times the viewership that CNN was getting on a daily basis.
That is pathetic.
That it just, it just didn't work.
And so, they set this goal of having 2 million subscribers to CNN Plus within the first few years of the service's launch.
Nobody's watching it.
It looks like they're going to cut their losses.
Why?
I could have told them that this was going to happen.
No one in their bubble could have told them this was going to happen because they have relied on brute force to maintain whatever position they have in public discourse for not just recent years, really recent decades.
People don't make the decision actively, I'm going to go subscribe to CNN. I don't even think they make the decision to go watch CNN. I think it's just kind of on.
We joke about how the only time people watch CNN is in the airports.
Well, there's a lot of truth to that joke.
Why do people watch CNN on their TVs on the rare occasions that they do?
Because it's just on.
CNN is bundled as part of cable packages.
I don't even subscribe to cable, but people who do subscribe to cable are not going to go in and say, I want every channel except for CNN. They're just going to take it and it'll be on.
They'll flick through the channels and that's that.
With CNN +, That subscription service requires you to actively go out, put down your credit card, say, I want CNN. And no one wants CNN. I'm not even just scoring cheap partisan points.
No one actively wants it.
It's just there as background noise, as a propaganda arm for the ruling class, which increasingly is losing its credibility.
All these guys are losing their credibility.
Jen Psaki, we played her on the show yesterday, spokesman for the president, was crying, literally crying on camera over the prospect of not being able to trans the kids.
So Jen Psaki appeared on Chris Wallace's new...
New, soon-to-be-old CNN Plus program to discuss this law.
Chris Wallace was basically fair about the law and about the question of transgendering the kids.
And Jen Psaki doubled down on it, saying that five-year-olds and six-year-olds are questioning their sex and ought to be affirmed in their delusions.
I understand that it's an emotionally fraught issue.
I understand that some of the supporters of the bill have used inflammatory language saying that opponents of the bill want to sexualize children or groom children.
On the other hand, don't parents have a right to have concern?
I mean, we're talking specifically here about teaching about sex in kindergarten through third grade.
I have to say, as a parent, I would have problems with that.
But the law is not about teaching sex education.
It's about teaching about gender identity.
And so, what do you do if a parent or a kid, should I say, a kid in one of these elementary schools, says, what about Sally?
Sally has two moms.
Or, I'm not sure if I'm a girl or a boy.
I mean, these are kids who are experiencing, you know, these moments in their lives.
I also think that these are not There's not a big record of there being either sex education or extensive gender identity education in these schools, and this is creating a problem or a political cudgel about an issue that I don't think exists.
Jen Psaki made a really big mistake here, and she did the thing that I keep pointing out that the libs do, except she actually did it backwards.
Usually what the libs do is say, this issue that's being addressed by the Florida Education Bill doesn't exist, it's not happening at all, and it's really important that the issue does exist.
And she just did it backwards here.
She said, this is so awful, this Florida education bill.
This is going to really hurt kids.
You know, Sally with two mommies, and you know, the five-year-old who thinks that he's actually a girl.
This is really going to hurt these kids.
It's going to hurt them so bad that I'm going to cry on camera.
I'm going to literally cry tears on camera.
But it's not happening.
It doesn't matter.
It's not doing anything.
It's addressing a problem that doesn't exist.
Well, if the problem doesn't exist, why are you crying, Jen?
If the problem doesn't exist, why are you trying to tug on my heartstrings about Sally, who doesn't have two mommies?
Sally has a mommy and a daddy, somewhere.
I don't know where the mommy and the daddy are, and I don't know what weird social experiment is messing with Sally's head.
But whatever Sally has, she doesn't have two mommies, because that's not how biology works.
That's not how babies are made.
That's not even a discussion the kindergartners should be having in the classroom, how babies are made.
But I guess the teacher should know the answer.
Sally doesn't have two mommies.
Further, the five-year-old boy who thinks that he's a girl is not a girl.
What should the teacher say to the five-year-old boy who says that he's a girl?
The teacher should say, you're not a girl.
You're a boy.
The teacher should affirm his actual sex, meaning dispel the delusions that he has.
The teacher should stand up for traditional standards and mores and biology and reality.
We have got to remain in contact with reality.
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Jen Psaki said yesterday, two days ago, that this issue of transgendering the kids makes her completely crazy.
And those are the truest words that Jen Psaki has ever said.
It does make her crazy.
It makes everyone who is in the thrall of this weird transgender ideology completely insane.
I'm at Boston right now.
I gave a speech last night at Boston University on this topic.
The topic was, teach the ABCs, not the LGBTs.
And the topic made people crazy.
There were more shenanigans at this speech I gave last night than I've seen at a campus speech in years.
First of all, the event was sold out, and then the captain of the BU Police Department wouldn't let half the audience into the room.
The captain of the BU Police Department, I don't know what his axe was to grind, he wouldn't let our photographer into the room.
There actually aren't any even professional photos from the event.
So you had half of the room was stuck outside, and they had to stream the speech on their phone.
And then of the people who were let in, there was a planned walkout by the left-wing lunatic kids.
I had an inkling of who those kids were going to be because they were the only people in the room with the masks.
This does underscore my point, my favorite part about the airplane mask mandate being lifted, which is just that you can now tell with 100% certainty exactly who the libs are.
So you just know.
You're like, okay, I guess I'm sitting next to one lib.
I'm just going to plan out my conversation now.
I'm going to plan out my flight.
So I'm looking and I see rows of these students wearing the masks and I think, okay, they're going to stage some protest.
And right when I got to the topic of the gender unicorn, the gender unicorn is this weird assignment about a purple sexually confused unicorn that is being handed out to third graders and second graders and kindergartners and even is being used in certain pre-K classrooms.
The Gender Unicorn and the Gender Bread Man.
That's another weird, creepy, sexually confused cookie assignment.
These are being used with really young kids.
When I mention that, the kids stormed up and flipped me off and yelled and screamed and said all crazy things and waved the transgender flag and then walked...
out of the room.
This issue makes people crazy.
And the point I drove home last night at BU, you can watch my speech online.
It's been streamed to YouTube.
It's over at the YAF YouTube channel.
The point I made here is that it's not enough just to stop the weird sex lessons in the classroom.
You've got to go further.
Teachers need to teach something.
It's not enough just to say, hey, don't talk about transgenderism to six-year-olds.
Well, what are we going to talk about?
If you're reading a story in a kindergarten classroom and the story is about a family of bears, mama bear, daddy bear, and baby bear, I don't think anyone would object to that, right?
Even though the lesson does have implicit lessons about sex, about family, about human nature.
Where did Baby Bear come from?
Baby Bear came from Mama Bear and Daddy Bear.
And Mama Bear and Daddy Bear lived together in a marriage because that's a sort of ordinary, normal thing to do.
Well, what if the story instead being read to this kindergarten classroom were about daddy bear and daddy bear's boyfriend and daddy bear's boyfriend's polyamorous trans billy goat and this were being read to five-year-olds?
Would we object to that?
I think we probably would.
We would.
You say, no, thank you.
Don't read that to my kid.
Both stories make implicit claims and have implicit lessons about sex and family and human nature.
But we like the normal one and we don't like the one with the trans billy goat.
It's not just, as some Republicans are saying, it's not just this education law in Florida bans all sexual discourse entirely.
Sometimes you'll hear Republicans say, you could call it the don't say straight bill, because it doesn't discriminate between gay or straight or trans or this.
It just says all sexual conduct is out.
But I just don't think that's really what we're talking about here.
I don't think that really gets to the heart of the issue.
You can't teach anything, even all the way down to an elementary school classroom, you can't teach anything about History.
Literature.
Biology, certainly.
Civics.
You can't teach these things if you don't touch on topics involving men and women and human nature.
Those things are just too central.
Sex and desire and family and community, those things are too central to the human condition to avoid.
And so I think we've got to stand up and say, no, we have norms.
Not saying we've got to be mean to gay guys.
Not saying we need to be cruel to people who are confused about their sex.
But we're allowed to have norms.
There's nothing bigoted about that.
The reason that Republicans don't want to say any of these things is because we're afraid of being called a homophobe or a transphobe or a phobe-phobe or whatever nonsense slur the libs want to throw at us.
But who cares?
They're going to throw slurs at you anyway, and what we're standing up for is perfectly ordinary and normal, and everybody would have agreed with it five years ago.
But now you go to a college campus, and people lose their minds talking about a really basic fact of human nature.
The craziest protests I've ever had, the only time I was physically assaulted on a campus, was talking about this issue.
This issue where the Overton window, as it's sometimes called, or the standards have just completely changed to the point that now you're not allowed to say men and women are different.
If you, for instance, if you go onto Twitter, and you don't make the general claim that men and women are different, but you go in, you're retweeting Bruce Jenner.
Bruce Jenner says, I'm a woman and I want to use the women's bathroom.
Let's say.
He's actually one of the least offenders on this transgender ideology, but let's go with it.
He's one of the most prominent ones.
And he says, I want to use the women's bathroom.
And you retweet that and you say, you are not a woman, Bruce Jenner.
That's a violation of Twitter's terms of conduct.
You could lose your Twitter account for that.
Because the Overton window has shifted.
But if you retweeted some, I don't know, straight white male and said, you are a terrible person and you are an oppressor and you're the cause of all the evil in the world, you won't lose your Twitter account.
The latter is objectively more offensive than the former.
The latter is not true, while the former is true.
And yet, you'll be banned for saying the true thing, and you'll be fine for saying the false thing.
Which is why it's so important that we get a hold on Twitter and Facebook and Google and the big tech platforms that control our speech and therefore control our democracy.
Which is why it's important that Elon succeeds in taking over Twitter.
And there's some news on this front.
Every day there's more news on Elon's hostile takeover of Twitter, and I'm here for it.
I love it.
It's great.
Elon Musk.
Bought over 9% of Twitter.
They tried to put him on the board.
He rejected the board seat because it would have greatly limited his power.
He tried to buy up the rest of the company.
The Twitter board issued a poison pill to dilute everyone's shares of Twitter and offer every other shareholder the ability to buy shares at a steep discount except for Elon Musk to basically make it prohibitive for Elon Musk to take over Twitter.
So that was it, right?
Well, not quite.
Elon Musk has then cryptically been tweeting about the word tender And the reason he's doing that is because it seems like he wants to make a tender offer where he goes directly to the shareholders of Twitter and just buys their shares from them and then eventually he'll have enough to control Twitter.
Can Elon actually do that?
Well, we're getting reports out right now that Elon Musk has secured $25.5 billion in financing to buy Twitter from a group of banks led by Morgan Stanley, which includes a $12.5 billion in margin loan against Twitter.
A $12.5 billion margin loan against his Tesla shares.
So he's leveraging his other company to buy Twitter.
And then Musk has said that the rest of the money, $21 billion, will come out of his own pocket.
This is being reported after Elon Musk has filed with the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission.
All of which is to say, I don't know how this is going to end, I don't know what the board is going to do, I don't know what the next episode of this saga is going to be.
But what that tells me is, Elon Musk is serious about it.
And he's serious about buying Twitter because Twitter's a serious problem.
We joke about it.
We call it a hell site.
We say we all waste too much time on it, and probably we do.
But Twitter, and to a greater degree Facebook and Google, control our speech, control our discourse, control our whole political order.
And Elon Musk gets it.
And he knows this is no laughing matter.
He'll troll on Twitter.
He'll joke when he buys 9% of the company that when he buys the rest of it, he's going to take the W out.
Tee-hee-hee.
He said titter.
Ha-ha-ha.
But he's dead serious here.
You don't spend $40 billion on a joke.
I don't think.
Maybe Jeremy would.
Maybe the god king of the Daily Wire would spend $40 billion on a joke.
But there has to be a serious point here.
And Elon Musk is really proving it.
I've been sort of down in the dumps at how excited I am about the mask mandate being taken away.
Because I think, is this our new standard?
This is it?
Hey, I get to breathe fresh air.
Score one for the conservatives.
That's it.
That's our new standard.
I'm a little down in the doldrums about how happy I am over the Florida education bill.
Yeah, we're going to wait until kids are nine to indoctrinate them into transgenderism.
Score one for the conservatives.
That's it.
That's our new standard.
That's all we can hope for.
It's easy to be discouraged because the libs have so much control over the culture and the political order.
But you have to remind yourself.
Take the win when you can get it.
Take the win when you can get it.
Get those marginal wins.
Creep a little bit further and further and further down the line of where you want your political goal to be, which is a flourishing, good, free society.
That's what the Libs did for a century.
It gave them the country.
Slowly, slowly, slowly.
A long march through the institutions.
We can take that ground back.
It's popular.
We've got the common sense.
The elite institutions have completely lost their credibility.
we can do it, but it's going to require patience and determination.
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I am very pro-Musk.
I'm pro-Elon Musk.
I don't know that I agree with him on everything.
It's kind of sad that the way that we take back speech and political control in our country these days is just to pit billionaire oligarchs off of one another.
But Musk, as far as billionaire masters of the universe go, Musk seems like one of the good guys.
And the reason that I have a hunch that he's one of the good guys is completely unrelated to Twitter or free speech or Big Tech or the Constitution.
It's actually...
It has to do with his answer to a particular hobby horse of extremely rich and powerful people.
For decades, actually for centuries now, very rich and very elite people have worried about overpopulation You saw this in the 1970s especially.
There was a book called The Population Bomb where all the genius elite scientists who follow the science and they're so smart and we should follow them.
They said that it was inevitable that within a decade you were going to see mass famines around the world.
You should encourage abortion.
You should encourage contraception.
You should coerce abortion and contraception if need be.
And even then we're still going to have mass famines and that's just what's because we have too many people in the world.
And then what happened?
It's 50 years later, the world population has doubled since that time, and people are fatter than ever.
Malnutrition is at an all-time low.
And Elon Musk has broken ranks with his fellow billionaires, and he's come out and said the problem in the world today is not overpopulation.
Actually, it's underpopulation.
Most people in the world are operating under the false impression that there are too many people.
This is not true.
Earth could maintain a population many times at the current level.
And the birth rate has been dropping like crazy.
So, unfortunately, we have these ridiculous population estimates from the UN that need to be updated because they just don't make any sense.
Really, you can just look at, say, what was the birth rate last year, how many kids were born, multiply that by the life expectancy.
And say, okay, that's how many people will be alive in the future.
And then say, is the trend for birth rate positive or negative?
It's negative.
So that's the best case, unless something changes with the birth rate.
Very simple explanation.
Very correct.
And most important of all, very pro-human.
Elon Musk might be the one billionaire who is pro-human.
All the rest of these guys.
Bill Gates in particular has this bizarre obsession with overpopulation and trying to discourage birth rates and to try to promote contraception and abortion and things like that.
This isn't some tinfoil hat stuff.
He's promoted this on television for decades at this point.
And all the rest of the libs are too, whether it's because of climate change, whether it's because of, I don't know, all sorts of neuroses that the libs have.
They want there to be fewer people.
And it's always interesting that the people prattling on about overpopulation never volunteer to help solve the problem.
You notice that?
All the people who are worried about overpopulation want someone else's kids not to be born, want someone else's kids to be killed through abortion.
It's never them.
It's never they themselves who say, you know, okay, I'll check out.
There's too many people on earth, I'm out.
Ronald Reagan made a similar point on abortion.
He said, I notice all the people who support abortion have already been born.
That's convenient, isn't it?
So it seems like it's out of left field, but Elon Musk's answer on that question tells me, at a really basic fundamental level, this guy gets it.
This guy, one, understands reality and realizes that the earth could sustain many times the number of people that are currently on it.
But two, he likes people.
He's not a misanthrope.
He's not saying, we need fewer people so that I can have more stuff and money and resources.
Like all of the other rich guys.
He's saying, no, we can have more people.
Have more people.
We don't have enough.
Come on, have kids.
Make a family.
Have some kids.
Let's go.
The more the merrier.
It's a very human perspective.
Speaking of humanity, a really horrible story coming out of Los Angeles.
Homeless deaths in Los Angeles have increased over the past five years.
This is people who die because of exposure, just die on the street.
And they've increased not by a little bit, But by 200% in just five years.
Nearly 2,000 homeless people died in LA County last year, according to a report by the New York Times.
Hundreds of those who did so, did so in plain sight of passers-by.
People just walking on by them.
287 of these people died on the sidewalk.
Another 72 were found on the pavement.
24 of them died in alleys.
This is based on a report from the L.A. County Coroner.
Is that humane?
The Libs tell us that if we do not let bums and derelicts and mentally ill people and addicts live in squalor on the street, that we're cruel, we're anti-homeless, we're inhumane.
You think this is humane?
I don't think this is humane at all.
I think it's a horrible, disordered thing that we allow people to live on the street.
I remember back during Occupy Wall Street, so this was probably 10 years ago now, Rudy Giuliani, speaking of this as a New Yorker, as someone who was the best mayor of New York probably in that city's history, came out and he said, this is a simple question.
Don't let people live on the street.
Living on the street is a disordered act that harms the individual and harms society.
Why are the libs in LA doing this?
They're doing this because it's nice.
They think it's the nice thing to do.
I guess it is the nice thing to do.
You don't bother the homeless people.
You let the drug addicts do what they want to do, at least what their appetites want to do.
And you just, hands off, not my problem.
I'm going to look away.
But it's not loving.
It's not loving at all.
You're letting these people live in squalor, experience great pain, be completely discarded by society and then die.
And you're seeing their death numbers go through the roof.
It would be much more loving to force these people into homeless shelters, force these people into rehabilitation centers, force the criminals among these people into prisons.
That would be much more loving.
It's tough love, sure, but it's a much more loving thing.
And that is the conservative answer.
And the Libs want to convince us that when we get back to reality and get back to basics and enforce the fundamental, lowest bar basic functions of a society, that we're cruel and inhumane.
Not at all.
It is completely, completely the opposite.
Speaking of reality, have you checked out Matt Walsh's book yet, Johnny the Walrus?
Matt Walsh, as you know, is one of the most cherished, leading LGBTQ plus bestselling authors in the country.
He is a scholar in the Department of Women's Studies.
A really, really noted sexual theorist.
So Matt has his great book.
That would be Johnny the Walrus.
It sold out within 48 hours when it was released.
Don't worry, more copies are on the way.
So, reserve your copy of Johnny the Walrus over on Amazon.
us on.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite time of the week.
We are now in the mailbag.
First question up from Brandon.
Dear Michael, did you ask your wife's father for his blessing in marriage before you proposed to her?
The reason I ask is because I plan on proposing in the near future.
However, I'm not sure if I respect her liberal dad for constantly calling me every name in the book for being a conservative.
He's also pretty frustrated that I converted his daughter to a conservative Christian and we have plans on moving from California to Texas.
I know that he wants me to ask him, but to point out the hypocrisy, he never asked his wife's father for his blessing.
I'm just curious what your thoughts are.
Yes, I I did ask my father-in-law his blessing.
I like my father-in-law a lot.
It sounds like you don't really like your father-in-law very much, but you should ask his blessing anyway.
Not because your father-in-law is some great guy, but because it's the right thing to do.
The act of asking a blessing is not so much about the people involved, the prospective groom and the father-in-law, as it is about the act itself.
It's a good, respectful act.
It's the sort of thing that good, civilized young men will do.
And so whether you're doing it for him or not, whether he plays any factor into your thoughts on doing it, you should do it for yourself and you should do it because it's the right thing to do, young man.
From George. Michael, I wanted to get your opinion on having arguments with leftists in comment sections online.
I often find myself getting into these arguments on YouTube and the Lion's Den TikTok, in which I can probably count on one hand the number of times the discussion has ended peacefully or in good faith.
Most of the time, the other side will start resorting to insults mid-conversation or start talking to me in a condescending manner.
My question is, is it worth participating in these arguments at all or should we just let them be?
It is not worth participating and you should just let them be.
Yes, that's it.
The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, right?
I'm not saying you should necessarily get off of social media.
I'm not even saying you should necessarily stop voicing your opinions on social media.
But there is really no reason for you to get into fights in the comment section.
And these long threads, you're probably not going to convince the person you're talking to.
Now, there might be a side benefit of this, which is you might convince people who happen to be reading the thread This is the purpose of really big public debates.
When you have a dinner party and you go out and have drinks and cigars and you start talking to someone, you could have maybe a private debate and potentially persuade the other person or that person could persuade you.
When you're standing on a stage having a formal debate, the point is not to persuade the other person.
The point is to score as many points as you can and persuade people in the audience.
That's pretty much the same thing that you're seeing in social media.
So...
You might get something out, or someone else might benefit from that, or you might just make your point in the comments section and then let it go and move on with your life.
And you'll have more time to make more comments and do things that are more productive and more edifying.
Chris says, Or hide it from her out of shame.
I decided the best outcome was to be completely truthful with her about it, and thank God my wife didn't blame me at all.
While my wife wanted to do some terrible things to the woman that assaulted me, we decided I wouldn't report the assault out of fear of retaliation from the woman and possibly my job, given the hashtag MeToo skew in paper of women.
Ironically, my wife and I have never been closer, and our emotional connection has reached a deeper level.
I think I know your answer, but what is your opinion on tragic and emotionally distressing things bringing a marriage closer together?
Well, that certainly happens.
Shared experience is a really important part of marriage.
I asked my grandfather this.
My grandfather and grandmother have the best marriage I've ever seen.
They've been married for about a bazillion years.
And I asked him, years and years ago, even before I was about to propose, I said, maybe this was on his 60th wedding anniversary, I said, what's the key to a good marriage?
And my grandfather said, patience, shared experience, and frequent absence.
Because he was a captain in the Navy, and so he would deploy for long periods of time.
And that was a pretty funny joke.
There's probably some truth to that, actually, too.
But shared experience is a really important one.
Because you're going to grow together, or grow apart.
And it doesn't mean...
Just going on fun rides at Disney World, it doesn't mean just that great vacation to Hawaii and all the happy memories, but the sad memories, too, will bring you closer together as well, as they are shared experiences.
As for telling your wife, I don't know the details of this assault.
Sometimes it's hard to even picture it, because you think, well, if some woman is going to come up and assault you, why don't you just push her out of the way?
You're bigger, presumably.
But I don't know.
I mean, obviously it does happen, so I'm not Disputing that.
But in terms of your struggle with this, do I tell my wife?
Maybe you feel embarrassed about it.
Maybe you feel some shame about it.
Well, you certainly shouldn't feel any shame in that, unless you were participating, unless this is not just a clear-cut assault, you didn't do anything wrong.
In order to commit a sin, it requires an act of the will.
Certainly, to commit a mortal sin requires an act of the will, and you were an unwilling participant here.
And this issue in particular is coming up because of this case between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, a defamation case that Johnny Depp is bringing because of this very acrimonious breakup between the two.
I have not been watching the case.
Because I'm a grown man, and I'm not...
We got other things to do.
But it is fascinating, the reports that I've been reading about it, because this woman, Amber Heard, seems to be a complete loony tune, and just extraordinarily manipulative, and wicked, and just a terrible person.
And poor Johnny Depp does seem generally like the victim here.
So what's the answer to that?
I've had people write into me and say, similar points.
Michael, can you please talk about woman-on-male domestic violence?
And so what do you do with that?
Well, I still come down to the point that the men need to handle it.
The men need to get a hold on things.
The men need to lead here.
And so it's bad.
You might find yourself with a complete lunatic like Amber Heard.
But still, it's kind of on you to take some control of the situation.
And if something goes wrong and if you suffer in some way, you shouldn't feel any shame about that unless you're a willing participant.
From Andrew.
Hello, Nolstradamus.
This may be a triggering question to some.
I expect not to many of the Daily Wire subscribers.
Do you think there is any correlation with the current movement of gender ideology and self-identity with a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental disorder?
Throughout history, many topics that these agendas are pushing could land someone in a mental institution.
Is it possible we're seeing history repeat itself or simply a minority of confused individuals now have the ability to indoctrinate impressionable minds at the click of a button?
Well, of course.
If you're a man who thinks that he's a woman, then you have a mental disorder.
You have a very acute, very clear mental disorder.
There's no question about that.
It's in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
It's in the DSM, the textbook of psychiatry.
So that's certainly the case.
There is a social phenomenon, too, though.
Because while a very small number of people suffer from this acute psychological condition where you have confusion about your sex, the numbers are now exploding because it's also a social phenomenon and because these delusions are being affirmed by all of the institutions of power, whether we're talking about the White House, whether we're talking about corporations, whether we're talking about big tech, whether we're talking about a kindergarten teacher.
Everyone is affirming this madness that a boy can become a girl.
And so there are some people who...
Might not have severe psychiatric conditions who are just going along with this because it's in the zeitgeist.
It's blowing along.
And that's a big problem.
And we need a little bit of tough love here, I think.
We need to stop being so nice and be a little bit tougher and more loving and tell people who are confused, no, you're not a woman.
And even conservatives need to get tougher on this.
Conservatives try to split the baby and so they'll say, well, if a grown man who is wearing a dress who calls himself Sally, if he wants to pretend that he's a woman, that's his right, that's totally fine.
But just don't do it to little kids.
No, it's not his right.
He has no right.
You have no right to delusion.
And we have no obligation as a society to indulge delusion, no matter what the ruling class tells us.
No, we actually have an obligation to tell him the truth and say, no, Buster, you're not.
Take the dress off.
Stop calling yourself Sally.
Sally's a girl's name.
You're Sam.
You're a boy.
Sam's kind of an anirogenous name anyway, so there you go.
And you can't use the girl's room, and you can't swim on the Penn Girl swim team, and you've got to come back to reality.
From Julia.
Dear Smokey Mike, is there any way you can send out the chords to Together Again from your original album?
I promise I won't steal anything.
I'm just not good enough to figure out what chords to play, and I can't get the song out of my head.
Love Smokey Mike's number one fangirl.
P.S. Don't tell Jeremy, but I'll be on your side 100% when the band breaks up.
Thank you, Julia.
You're obviously a woman of discerning taste.
Um...
I can't send you the chords two together again because I don't remember them.
I realized this the other day.
I pulled out my guitar.
I was playing guitar.
My son was playing around.
I figured I'd play a little guitar for him.
And I remembered the guitar solos.
I was kind of playing the solos, but I realized I couldn't remember exactly how to play the song.
I'm sure I could remember it and figure it out pretty quickly, but...
That's what happens with music magic.
You know, these things just pop out of the God King's head.
He did write that song in the shower.
He literally wrote that song standing in the shower.
It pops out of the God King's head.
And we sit there, you know, like 1970s National Treasure Rockstars.
We play it.
And it's gone, man.
It's in the ether.
If you want it again, you've got to just keep clicking play on Spotify, on Apple Music, on YouTube.
From Nick.
Uh-oh.
Nick.
We've missed Nick.
Hey, Michael.
Me again.
I'm sorry for being MIA the past few months.
I've been on a spiritual journey.
So apparently there's this thing called ayahuasca.
Long story short, I fell off my king energy and was seduced by another goddess who loves crystals.
I was listening to Joe Rogan and got really into the Beatles, none of which I'm proud of.
After I lost track of Sydney in Tulum and made it back to the States, I couldn't shake the ayahuasca trip.
I felt like I saw and spoke to other beings.
It was nuts.
Do you think ayahuasca and DMT make you hallucinate or finally see what's already there?
As a spiritual dude who doesn't do drugs, I figured you could tell me what's up.
This is actually a good question, Nick, and I get this from a lot of people.
They'll say, hey, man, you know, I'm not religious or nothing.
I'm not one of you crazy Christians or nothing, you know, but I do a bunch of drugs and I see lots of spirits, man, you know, and so I believe in that, you know.
Oh, so you believe in demons.
Okay.
You don't believe in angels and God, but you do believe in demons.
Okay.
I don't do drugs.
I've never been into drugs.
The hardest drug I've ever had was a puff or two on the old Haitian oregano, but it does not interest me because I don't want brain damage, and I think I rely on my brain.
I think it's working okay right now, and if I want to explore Metaphysical questions like you're talking about, I would like to do it in a way that is rigorous, that does not involve me losing control of my rational faculties and my will like you do when you do drugs, but that actually focuses my intellectual faculties and my will on things like philosophy and theology that applies intellectual rigor to all of these questions.
So what are people seeing when they take ayahuasca or DMT or whatever other mushrooms or acid?
What are they seeing?
Well, they could be hallucinating.
Probably.
That's a big part of it.
But also, there is more between heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies, Horatio.
Also, there is a spiritual reality to the world.
There are angels and there are demons and there is spiritual battle.
And there's good and bad and right and wrong.
And we're in that.
And we are bodies, but we're also souls.
And so that stuff is real.
And when you...
Lose control of your intellect and your will, you open yourself up to a lot of potentially pretty nasty things.
We talk about spirits.
Forget about ayahuasca for a second.
Let's say you just go out and you drink too much.
You're opening yourself up by drinking a lot of spirits.
You are opening yourself up, in a way, to spirits because you're no longer in control of your will.
So, long and short, Nick, is don't do drugs, buddy.
Go to church.
Open your Bible and go to church.
From Jen.
Jen Nostradamus, you are the very person I believe can help me answer this question about evangelization.
It is my understanding that Catholics slash Christians should spread the word of God, but how can one do that without being an overbearing Jesus freak to those around them?
Or how can I tell my friends of that?
Description, how to chill.
It's a good question.
A friend of mine, when he was converted, when he described this experience of just being opened to the Holy Spirit, he said his first thought was, Dear God, please don't make me a Jesus freak.
And he meant, that's actually a good place.
Please.
And I had a pretty radical reversion as well after college in my early 20s.
It was a process that was gradual and then sudden.
So I really can empathize with what you're talking about here.
And everyone, when people convert or revert, I have noticed they go through a very intense period where they're pretty weird.
Because it's a pretty wild experience.
So I suppose my prudential judgment here, though, is...
If you want to persuade people, if you want to convert people, you can't seem like you're just completely off your rocker.
You can be joyful, you can be excited, you can be eager to spread the joy that lives within you.
But you've got to be grounded in reality as well.
Don't forget, the Gospels are not poetry.
They're not philosophy.
The Gospels are news reports.
The Gospels are journalism accounts.
And the rest of the New Testament is letters.
It's grounded in real, hard facts.
That's where the hope lies.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you Monday.
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.
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.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky.
Editor and Associate Producer, Danny D'Amico.
Associate Producer, Justine Turley.
Audio Mixer, Mike Coromina.
And Hair and Makeup by Cherokee Heart.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
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