Biden’s fully vaxxed HHS secretary contracts COVID for the second time in 25 days, Biden blames Republicans for inflation, and New York’s highest court rules that elephants aren't people.
Watch our Summer blockbuster “Terror on the Prairie” with Gina Carano: https://utm.io/ueFOe
Watch Matt Walsh’s new Daily Wire original documentary “What Is A Woman?” at whatisawoman.com, and pick up your copy of the “What Is A Woman?” book here: https://utm.io/ueFMe.
Join Michael and the Daily Wire for Backstage Live At The Ryman on June 29th. Get your tickets now: https://utm.io/uezFr
—
Today’s Sponsors:
With thousands of satisfied customers and an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, Birch Gold can help you protect your savings. Text "KNOWLES" to 989898 for your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit.
Mizzen+Main combines the comfort and flexibility of your favorite athletic wear with the fit and style of a custom dress shirt. Use promo code "KNOWLES" and get $35 OFF any regularly priced order of $125 or more at MizzenAndMain.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
26 days ago, Joe Biden's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, came down with COVID. This was very strange, you see, because Becerra was fully vaccinated and boosted with those vaccines that we were told are totally safe and effective and would prevent people from catching COVID. But he came down with it 26 days ago, and then he recovered.
And then do you know what happened yesterday?
You know.
You know, I don't even have to tell you.
Yesterday, the fully vaxxed and boosted Becerra, who had just gotten over COVID, came down with COVID again.
A couple of months ago, Democrat Representative Maxine Waters came down with COVID. Also pretty weird, since Waters also was fully vaccinated and boosted.
But you know what's even weirder?
You know what happened two days ago?
You're not going to...
Actually, you will.
You probably...
Maxine Waters came down with COVID again.
And then the weirdest part of all, do you know what she said when she announced her second bout of COVID in two months?
You know what she said.
She said the line that they always say.
She said she is, quote, grateful to be fully vaccinated and to have received two booster shots.
Then she encouraged everyone to get the vaccination and the boosters that did not stop her from catching COVID twice in the same quarter.
It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
It's not even all that sad that they caught COVID. They both seem like they're doing just fine.
What is sad is that they say these things with a straight face.
They say it with a straight face and they expect us to believe it.
They expect us to go along with it.
How?
How can they do it?
Oh yes, make sure you get these things that are super-duper effective.
I know that I seem to be catching COVID every week now, but it's really important that you go get it.
How do they do it?
Is it ignorance?
No doubt these people are pretty ignorant.
Certainly Maxine Waters is.
Lots of them are.
But I don't think, primarily, this is about ignorance.
I think it's narcissism.
I think what we're seeing here is a battle between the intellect and the will.
Between seeing things as they are and dreaming things that never were.
Between reality and selfish pride.
And at every single turn of that battle, our ruling narcissists are choosing their delusions and themselves.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Alexandra de Berdeja, who says, I became a member of the Daily Wire, and I didn't realize how much I'd enjoy seeing Michael's face during the second half of the show.
That's so kind of you.
Thank you, Alexandra.
It is true.
My face gets much more beautiful in the second half when it's all blurred out on YouTube.
That's why you've got to join Michael.
Daily Wire.
Use code Knowles.
I think that's the code.
We have so many codes now.
Head on over.
Become a member right now.
It's very important.
It's a very good way to invest your money in a Daily Wire membership.
Another way you might be looking to invest right now, in gold, which is why you've got to check out Birch Gold.
Right now, text Knolls to 989898.
Fear of out-of-control inflation is hammering the stock market.
The S&P 500 is having its worst start to the year since World War II. So not only are your savings worth less, you now have less of it.
Now might be a good time for you to diversify into gold, the most stable asset in the history of the world.
Birch Gold is the company that I trust to help convert an IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold and silver.
That is right.
Not only will Birch Gold help you fortify your savings with precious metals, they will help you do it in a tax-sheltered account.
Amazon stock is down 37% in the first half of the year.
Tesla's down 40%.
Cryptos are getting absolutely crushed right now.
Many fear that the hawkish moves by the Fed could stall the economy.
So what's your plan?
The best time to take action is yesterday.
The next best time is today.
Text Knowles to 989898.
Get your free no-obligation info kit on gold from Birch Gold.
They are the precious metals professionals.
Text Knowles to 989898.
Secure your savings now.
Right now it is 8.34 in the morning central time here in Nashville, Tennessee.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to release its opinions in 26 minutes.
The opinion that is expected today is the opinion in Dobbs v.
Jackson Women's Health Organization.
This is the opinion that could and seems likely will uphold a pro-life law in Mississippi and could very possibly overrule Roe v.
Wade and Planned Parenthood v.
Casey, could overrule a fictional constitutional right to abortion that was invented by the Supreme Court in 1973.
This would be the most significant Probably most significant political event, at least domestic political event, of our lifetimes in half a century.
And we are waiting with bated breath.
The Democrats canceled their January 6th hearings today, which suggests that perhaps they got some word that this big decision is going to come out.
comes out, I think it is inevitable that we're going to see rioting from the radical leftists.
They've already tried to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh over this.
They have been illegally gathering outside of the justices' homes for weeks now.
The Supreme Court justice who wrote the draft opinion that was leaked, Sam Alito, was put into hiding, basically, to protect him and his family.
So we are waiting with bated breath on this decision.
The Supreme Court usually runs on time.
Unlike those politicians and the elected people, The court usually runs on time.
So this is very possible.
We don't know.
We could be disappointed.
I have instructed my producers to be refreshing the page every two seconds so that we can react in real time.
The libs cannot admit that they are wrong.
And so if the opinion does come out to overrule Roe v.
Wade, expect wailing and gnashing of teeth from all the worst sorts of political activists in the country.
And it's because they can't admit that they were wrong.
They're obviously wrong about abortion.
There's just no justification for killing an innocent little baby.
But they're wrong on the constitutional point, too.
No serious legal or constitutional scholar seriously argues that there is a right to abortion enshrined in the Constitution, that the framers of our Constitution hid between the emanations and the penumbra as an invisible ink, some right to kill your own baby.
It's not there.
If anything, there is a prohibition on killing babies because of the 14th Amendment and equal protection.
And you can trace this back to Blackstone's commentaries.
You could make that argument.
There's no way to make the argument seriously that there is a constitutional right to an abortion.
They are insisting on this because of this battle between the will and the intellect.
The intellect says there's no right to abortion in the Constitution.
The will says we want it and we're going to get it.
And we're not going to let logic or reason or facts or reality get in the way.
This is what Joe Biden's doing right now on inflation.
The Republicans came out even before Biden got into office back when the Congress, with the support of many Republicans, was voting to spend all sorts of money on COVID, lock down the economy, print up a bunch of money.
There were Republicans who came out and said it's a bad idea because you can't just print money endlessly and give it away to people and expect the economy to remain strong.
The inevitable result of those sorts of actions is going to be massive inflation.
And they were mocked and they were derided.
And they were hushed up.
But these Republicans predicted it.
They said, if you do what the Democrats are proposing, you're going to get a lot of inflation.
Never mind that you're going to stop American energy.
You're going to kill the American pipelines.
You're going to stop new oil and gas leases.
You're going to create the conditions for a major war in Europe, first one since World War II. All of that is going to cause prices to go through the roof.
You're going to shut down the entire economy, then you're going to open it up again.
That's going to create tension on the economy.
That's going to cause prices to go up.
So it wasn't brain surgery, okay?
It wasn't rocket scientists.
The Republicans said, if you follow these policies, you're going to get inflation.
Then what happened?
Exactly what they predicted came true.
And now what's Joe Biden doing?
He's blaming the Republicans for inflation.
There's nobody suggesting there's unchecked inflation on the way.
No serious economist.
So that was back in July.
That was back in July of last year.
There's no serious economist who's predicting inflation, but all the Republicans were, okay?
And Joe Biden said, no, no, they're wrong, they're wrong, they're full of it.
There's no way, the economists don't believe it.
Then what does he say yesterday to the AFL-CIO, the big labor union?
He says, actually, forget about this, it's the Republicans' fault.
It's sapping the strength of a lot of families.
I grew up in a household not far from here, Claymont and Wilmington, where the price of a gallon of gasoline went up was a conversation at the dinner table.
It mattered.
It mattered to my working family.
It mattered if the price of food went up.
The problem is, Republicans and Congress are doing everything they can So stop my plans to bring down costs for unordinary families.
That's why my plan is not finished and why the results aren't finished either.
Jobs are back, but prices are still too high.
COVID is down, but gas prices are up.
That's true.
The gas prices are up because of your policies.
The policies that you said would not cause inflation, and the Republicans said they would cause inflation.
The conservatives certainly said it.
Ted Cruz was calling this.
Even Lindsey Graham, who's kind of squishy, even Lindsey Graham was calling this, was saying this is going to cause massive inflation.
These sorts of big spending policies, certainly the conditions for the war to break out in Ukraine, certainly shutting down American energy, that's going to cause the inflation.
And then he says, what?
These Republicans don't care about inflation.
They're stopping me.
No, it's your agenda that it did it, buddy.
And it's just totally, totally shameless.
But he can't admit that he was wrong.
The Democrats broadly cannot admit that they were wrong.
They cannot have a moment's reflection.
They cannot sit down and say, oh, I guess you guys were right.
I guess you predicted it.
This is what's driving conservatives crazy.
Because all the crazy, wild, kooky conspiracy theories that conservatives were suggesting about COVID-19, about the lockdowns for the past two years, about inflation, about foreign policy, about immigration, about everything, about what would happen if you change the definition of marriage, and if you mainstream things like transgenderism, it's going to end up in the schools.
They said, no, no, it's crazy, it's crazy, that's never going to happen.
And then it did happen.
And then they look us in the face and they say, no, no, no, don't believe your lying eyes.
We suggested, you know, I'm a little skeptical of the vaccines.
I don't think that it's really going to stop people from catching COVID and spreading COVID. They said, you're crazy, you're a conspiracy theorist.
And then what happens?
They all catch COVID like every three weeks now.
And then they look us in the face and they have the gall, the temerity to say, I'm so grateful that I got my vaccines and my boosters.
I'm so glad we shut down American energy.
I'm so glad we're spending more money than we could possibly imagine.
I'm so glad.
I'm so glad.
You better keep on doing it.
Why are you awful Republicans standing in our way?
The feeling of being gaslit on these issues is so positively infuriating because there's no reasoning with it.
There's no logic.
There's no argument.
All that the libs are foisting upon us is the sheer tyranny of their will.
They're saying, facts be damned, reality be damned.
I want it, and I'm going to have it, darn it.
Now, you know what I want?
I want to look good.
And when I want to look good, you know what I wear?
Mizzen and Maine.
Right now, go to MizzenandMaine.com.
Use promo code Knowles.
Are you taking your first vacation in forever, and you are not sure what to wear?
Who's ready to cut out early and hit the links in some new golf gear?
That is why you've got to check out Mizzen& Main.
I love Mizzen& Main.
They combine the comfort and flexibility of your favorite athletic wear with the fit and style of a custom dress shirt.
Lightweight, breathable, moisture wicking.
These guys will have you looking great.
Their dress shirts are machine washable.
You can skip those trips in the expense of the dry cleaner.
You think of all that time and all that money you'll save.
They got famous for their dress shirts.
Mizzen in Maine now also makes incredibly comfortable flannels, no-tuck shirts, performance polos, chinos, so much more.
I love all of them.
You know, I wear Oxford shirts and polos pretty much exclusively, and being of Italian descent, sometimes I perspire.
Mizzen in Maine looks good.
The style's beautiful.
It looks great, and it will keep you dry, keep you feeling good.
Whether you're working from the golf course or finally taking advantage of that unlimited vacation policy, we've got excellent news.
Right now, if you go to MizzeninMaine.com and use promo code Knowles, you will receive $35 off any regular price order of $125 or more.
That is $35 off when you go to M-I-Z-Z-E-N-A-N-D-M-A-I-N.com.
Use promo code Knowles.
You see the narcissism of our present culture, not just in Congress, not just in the White House.
You see it perhaps most clearly in the Amber Heard trial.
Amber Heard was out there.
She just lost this defamation case that Johnny Depp brought against her.
She made all these claims.
Johnny Depp beat her.
He was abusive.
And then she was caught on tape in many cases, and certainly with the testimony of witnesses, having lied.
And she lost that case.
Now she's going out and playing victim again.
Even the left-wing media...
Or calling her out on it in some cases.
She was speaking to Savannah Guthrie on the Today Show.
And Guthrie just asked this really basic question.
Hold on, you're telling me that all the evidence, all the testimony, everybody who has some knowledge about this, it's all just wrong?
They're all just lying?
Even somebody who is sure I'm deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I'm lying, You still couldn't look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there's been a fair representation.
You cannot tell me that you think that this has been fair.
I absolutely can tell you that.
I didn't even watch that much of the trial, but everything I saw suggests this was, in fact, much more fair than many trials and trials in court and trials in the press that we've seen in recent years.
A lot of evidence was presented, and all of the evidence suggested that Amber Heard was lying.
Savannah Guthrie pushes her on this point.
She says, wait, hold it.
So you're saying that everything that came out against you was just BS? But then there are other times, there's another tape where you're taunting him and saying, oh, tell the world, Johnny Depp, I, a man, am a victim of domestic violence.
Twenty-second clips or the transcripts of them are not representative of even the two hours or the three hours that those clips are excerpt from.
Could your side have just put the whole three hours in then?
I'm not a lawyer.
As I testified to, I was talking in those recordings as a person an extreme amount of emotional, psychological, and physical distress.
He says he never hit you.
Never.
Is that a lie?
Yes, it is.
What about the witnesses who said they have seen you instigate physical violence?
I've seen firsthand how people will file rank and support the person they depend on.
Did they all come in and lie in court?
I am not here to call any of There it is.
There is the giveaway right there at the end.
Because she's just denied, denied, denied the whole time.
That old Italian phrase in New York, deny till you die.
She's just keeping it up.
And then so Guthrie brings in this question of objective reality.
She's saying, okay, well...
If what you say is true, Amber, then everyone who testified against you is either extremely mistaken or more likely lying.
But Amber Heard doesn't want to go that far because it's absurd.
And so she says, no, I'm not saying they're lying.
I'm just telling you what it felt like for me.
Now it's no longer what it was, what it did, what the reality is.
This is what it felt like for me.
Me, me, me, me, me.
It's all about me and my feelings.
She is so insistent upon her own will, on her own desires, on what she wants, that she is totally ignoring truth and reality.
She's just neglecting.
She doesn't really care what it is.
And when forced to confront that, she says, forget about the truth for a second.
Just talk about me and my feelings.
I want to talk about confused young women that There was a viral clip from one of the pride parades around the country of some poor young women who were dressed up in all sorts of weird LGBT, the baby blue and the baby pink purple and all the rainbow and the trans and the this and the that.
And an interviewer just came out and asked them on the street, hey, what does this mean for you?
Why are you here today?
Who are you?
I'm gay.
What age did you know that you were gay?
I think at like 10, I knew that I... I think at 10, but I wasn't clear on my gender.
Yeah, I think it was around like 10 as well when I started questioning if I was bi.
And then since then it was kind of like a slippery slope because I kept...
I was like, am I bi, omni, lesbian?
And then I kind of like came to the point...
And now, recently I've been like, am I pan?
But then I think...
Now I'm starting to realize that I'm queer, but yeah, it started around 10.
It wasn't, like, fully formed, but I guess, like, that's when I realized, wait, that's a possibility?
Yeah.
I am genderqueer, transmask, and queer.
What's transmask?
Transmask is, like, people under the non-binary umbrella identifying, like, or presenting mask.
Masculine?
Yeah.
What about you?
Um, I'm trans and, uh...
My sexuality is unlabeled.
I use he, him pronouns.
Yeah, and I use he, they pronouns.
He, him, he, they, trans mask.
I was gay, then I realized I'm more pan, trans.
I don't know, you know, a little bit non-bi, trans, pan.
Wadawada bing bong.
This video was put up by Savannah Hernandez and then her account got nuked for apparently no reason.
But you can still find it somewhere on the internet.
Apparently you can find it on this show too.
We were lucky to get it there.
It tells you so much about the culture.
And do I feel bad for these young women?
I do.
I genuinely feel bad for these young women.
Do I think that the culture and the society is leading people to these sorts of disordered and destructive sexual ideologies?
For sure.
Of course, there's huge encouragement everywhere.
You can't find a corporate logo this month that doesn't have a bunch of rainbow colors urging people of every age, all the way down to two years old and three years old, to pretend to be the opposite sex and screw up their bodies and their lives.
So, yeah, there's a big part of that.
But this goes to the individual as well.
It's an individual problem.
And it's not just with that confused girl or the confused girl next to her.
And it's not just with the LGBT and the rainbows.
It's really a totally pervasive problem for all of us.
And the problem is narcissism.
Do you think there is one second of the day that those two young women aren't thinking about themselves?
The way that they talk, well, I was just, I was really focused on myself and the trans mask, and then I realized, no, I'm a little bit more of a pan today.
And then I woke up and, no, I wasn't feeling like a pan, man.
I was feeling like a pot and a plate, you know.
I was a little bit more of a trans, bi, this, that...
You know, there's a whole world out there, darling.
Look at it.
You look up, you can see the birds in the sky.
You can see the fish in the water.
You can read a book.
That's great.
What about a great novel?
How about you open up Jane Austen?
That'll be really interesting.
Or go watch a documentary.
Or just, I don't know, observe other people and stop thinking about yourself.
Because if you think about yourself all the time, you're going to drive yourself insane.
Which is what has happened.
To try to cure narcissism, egotism, the self-absorption, to try to cure that, you don't need to think less of yourself.
The whole point of Pride Month, so they say, is that you shouldn't feel bad about yourself.
You should feel really good about yourself.
You shouldn't think of yourself in a low way.
You should think of yourself in this really high, exalted way.
But the solution here is not to think less of yourself.
The solution is think of yourself less.
Just think of other things beyond you.
Think a little bit less of your desires and your appetites and your wants.
And start thinking about objective reality.
And maybe, dare I suggest, think about your duties and your obligations and your roles in your family and in your community and in your country.
Think about that.
It will cure a lot of those problems.
I went back.
I was going through some Christopher Lash last night as a result of this.
Christopher Lash, a great writer who famously wrote The Culture of Narcissism.
And he predicted this many years ago.
And what he saw happening in the culture seems to have been proven truer and truer every day.
He saw that since the early 1940s, really.
You had this therapeutic culture that was developing.
And psychologists were meeting with patients who did not have really well-defined systems.
They just had a kind of cornucopia of ill-defined dissatisfactions.
They just weren't feeling, you know, you're just feeling kind of blah.
And what am I? And what am I doing?
He saw a protective shallowness in emotional relations.
He saw people becoming hypochondriacal.
Oh my gosh, look around the culture.
We're a completely hypochondriac culture.
Everyone seems to think that they've got some super special little disorder.
They use the language of medicine to describe perfectly ordinary personality quirks.
People say, oh, I'm so OCD. They don't actually have obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I'm just OCD. Or, obviously, you see it in the sexual ideologies.
I'm trans, I'm pants, I'm this, I'm just so special.
I've got these medical problems.
You can't really identify anywhere on my body, but they're there.
You need to all cater to me and to my wishes and to my desires all the time.
What Lash saw was this special affinity for therapy.
Not going to therapy to fix your problem, but just to talk all the time.
We're always in this therapeutic kind of culture.
This fear of aging, this fear of death, this fear of time, this fear of This fear of doing anything outside of yourself.
But a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package indeed.
And I know there is this impulse among so many people to just coddle the people who are in the thrall of these ideologies and say, oh no, you're so confused sexually.
I feel so bad for you.
Sometimes people need a little bit of tough love here.
The narcissism isn't helping anybody.
It's so pervasive.
It's so easy to fall into.
For all of us.
I don't exclude myself or anyone in the audience from that.
But you've got to push back against it or we cannot have a society anymore.
Welcome to my show!
We've got the voice mailbag coming up on Friday.
So you can still submit your text mailbag questions.
You can still go in there and write them in.
I love to hear your beautiful, mellifluous, dulcet tones.
So please head on over to my page on The Daily Wire.
Click Submit a Mailbag Question.
You can only do that if you're a member.
Record your mailbag just on your phone, on any kind of app.
Attach it to the email.
Try to keep it under 60 seconds.
People like to wax poetic, but we need to fit it on the show.
Submit it, and then hopefully I'll hear your lovely voice on Friday.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
You wanna talk about narcissism in our culture, There was a TikTok video that just went viral from a woman named Remy Bader.
And Remy Bader showed up to a ranch, and I guess she wanted to ride horses, but there was a problem.
So she's walking around the ranch, and she's got a little caption there on her TikTok video.
It says, Shout out to Deep Hollow Ranch in Montauk for making me leave because I weigh over 240 pounds.
She's 240, there she is.
I don't think they made her leave the grounds.
I don't think they said, you know, you're going to fall through the earth and destroy the crops because you're 240 pounds.
They just wouldn't let her ride a horse.
She was really angry about that.
She took to TikTok to complain about that.
Because it's all about her.
You see, the whole world is about her.
And the suffering of other creatures doesn't matter as long as her pleasure is satisfied.
Why do you think this woman was turned away from riding the horses at the ranch?
Do you think it's because the ranchers just hated her?
Do you think it's because of her terrible oppression?
Or do you think it's because she was going to break the back of the horse and they took into consideration the feelings of the horse as well?
And they took into consideration propriety and what's good and just outside of this woman's own will.
But she says, I don't care if we break the back of the horse.
What do I care about the damn horse?
This is the same thing that the Marquis de Sade said.
Truly.
The Marquis de Sade, from whom we get the word sadism.
His big question was, why is your pain any more important than my pleasure?
That's narcissism.
That's the extreme pathological version of self-absorption and selfishness.
But it's much more than just a regular old selfishness, which everybody's got.
It's this inability and unwillingness and lack of desire to take into account anyone or anything else other than oneself.
She can't even see how ridiculous she looks posting that to Twitter.
Not just ridiculous because she's bragging about her weight as part of the body positivity pride movement.
That in itself is sort of a ridiculous thing.
But to come out and say, can you believe this?
They kicked me.
What about the poor horse?
Oh, you never thought about the horse.
Because you guys in this culture don't think about anything other than yourself.
And it's very, very sad for everybody involved.
We're living in a really low moment in our culture.
There's this prejudice that modern people have that we know so much more than all those old timey people.
You walk around the ruins of ancient Greece, you think, are these idiots?
They didn't even have iPhones.
You know, what a bunch of dummies, Aristotle and Plato.
What did they know?
They didn't even have computers.
What a bunch of dumb idiots.
They had to walk around places, but I have a Honda.
Those dummies, they were so unsophisticated.
And so we have this idea that our culture is really so much more advanced.
We're not.
I think if you really look into ancient Rome at its height, you look into Athenian imperial democracy, Athenian imperial democracy really, you look at the great civilizations, you realize they really had it a lot more together in many ways than we do.
In some cases technologically as well.
You look at the Roman aqueducts for goodness sakes.
And I think the clearest example of this today is that while the ancient Athenians may not have had iPhones, they knew what a woman is.
They knew quite a lot about man and his role in the universe, probably a lot more than the average person in our culture knows today.
We talk about this question, what is a woman?
This was a big Daily Wire documentary.
It's even gotten worse since then.
I thought that it could not possibly get dumber than having to explain to large swaths of our population that a man is not a woman.
But actually it's gotten even crazier.
We now have to explain to people that elephants are not people.
This was a real court case.
We're all waiting on the Dobbs decision and other court decisions from the SCOTUS today.
I've got an even crazier court decision that just came out of the New York State Court of Appeals.
Fortunately, it was decided the right way.
It was a 5-2 decision.
So actually, two judges on the court didn't seem to understand it.
The case was about this question, are elephants people?
This case was brought by the Non-Human Rights Project.
This is a radical animal rights group.
The organization requested a writ of habeas corpus to take Happy, a female Asian elephant that was brought to the Bronx Zoo in 1977, away from the zoo.
And the reason they wanted this writ of habeas corpus, this idea that you have a right to your body, the group contended that Happy the elephant was not, in fact, an elephant, but a person.
Because, they argued, elephants possess complex cognitive and emotional capabilities.
And therefore, because the elephant was, practically speaking, a person, it was illegal to confine the elephant to the zoo.
I'm not denying that elephants, relative to other animals, possess high intelligence and Sure, relative to human beings, not even close, and a lot of people are confused about this these days.
But relative to other animals, yeah, elephants seem very intelligent.
They possess an intellect that is appropriate to their animal condition.
But they're not people.
This is a big distinction here.
We used to understand that human beings are special.
Human beings uniquely possess will and intellect.
We have language such that we can communicate not merely our appetites and our desires, but we can communicate in an abstract and rational way about objective reality to one another.
That's how we're speaking right now.
That's how you're hearing what I'm saying.
That's how I'm going to hear from you in the voicemail bag on Friday.
That's how we have self-government.
It's how we decide what to have for dinner and everything else in between.
That is different from any other animal, including the elephants, who are relatively very intelligent, that's true.
But the elephants aren't people.
Here's how I'll prove it to you.
If elephants are persons, if they are people, then when they kill other elephants, certainly when they kill people, we would put them on trial.
That's what happens when you're a person.
When you do bad things when you're a person, when you commit crimes, you are held to account for those crimes.
And you're given a trial, and you have the right to due process, and then you can make a defense for yourself, or you get a lawyer, and then you're found guilty or innocent.
Do you think we should have a trial if an elephant kills some other animal and eats it?
No, that would be ridiculous.
Do you think we should even have a trial if an elephant kills a human being?
There are throughout history actually some really bizarro cases of people who either as a kind of public spectacle or because of a great deal of confusion have tried to try animals and then hang them or execute them.
The reason that these are notable throughout history is because they're so absurd.
We all know, every single person with two brain cells to rub together on Earth knows that it would be preposterous to put an elephant on trial.
Why?
Because we know that the elephant isn't a person.
Human rights, such as they are, Are inseparable from human responsibilities, human duties, human obligations.
And all of those things, the human rights and the obligations and the duties, are inseparable from humanity, which is different in kind from the rest of the natural environment.
Not just different in degree, like the libs want us to believe, but different in kind.
We're actually special.
We're actually made in the image of God.
And this isn't just some mystical pie-in-the-sky kind of notion.
This has real practical consequences and real practical effects that we can observe.
The fact that we can reason in an abstract way.
The fact that we have a lower will, the appetite, and a higher will, and we can actually sort of tame the appetite to some degree through the rational will that mediates between the divine will and the appetite.
All these sorts of things.
I'm just giving you the very...
Basic overview of the most elemental aspects of philosophy that have been discarded.
Because we've replaced all of that with will.
We've replaced all of that with just I want, I want, I want.
I think the reason that the libs are confusing animals with human beings is not because the animals are behaving like human beings.
It's because the human beings are behaving like animals.
And we're neglecting and discarding our higher will and our reason and our facts and our logic.
Why do you think that the videos, Ben kind of first popularized them, but then they became a whole genre of the internet.
So and so destroys such and such with facts and logic.
Why did that become such a big phenomenon?
Because we're living in a culture that increasingly discards facts and logic.
And we know that that's special.
We know that facts and logic are special and important and And something that play a central role in human life, or at least they did until recently, and we miss that.
That's why.
That's why we get all those clicks on YouTube, folks.
It's also why we're different.
Because the elephants, no matter how advanced they are, they cannot own you with facts and logic.
They will own you with their trunks and their hoofs and smush you if you cross them.
Speaking of animals and the zoo, animals are behaving even in a more bestial way, certainly at the Montana Zoo, because they're hosting a Drag Queen Story Hour there.
What is Drag Queen Story Hour?
It's when a bunch of perverts discard facts and reason and logic, and they go and jiggle and twerk and sexualize little kids.
And that's what's going on now at this Montana Zoo.
Zoo Montana in Billings, Montana, has planned the event for June 22nd.
Coming up, get your tickets now.
People in the local community said, hey man, what the heck?
This is Montana.
This isn't San Francisco.
This isn't Brooklyn, New York.
Get this nonsense out of Montana.
The zoo's director says no way.
The director of Zoo Montana, Jeff Uelt, says, we've heard from many of you in regard to the 406 Pride Drag Queen Story Hour being held at the zoo later this month.
Let me be clear.
Zoo Montana prides itself in being inclusive of all living things.
406 Pride is a respected and valued community asset, one we are proud to support and host at Zoo Montana.
While personal threats and threats of no longer supporting the zoo are concerning, we will not let unwarranted fear and hate deter our decision to move forward with this harmless and fun reading event.
So you get these perverts.
In some cases, notable cases, have been sex offenders to show up and jiggle half-naked for your little kids.
That's totally harmless, right?
It's a fun reading event that's held throughout the country.
Unfortunately, that's true.
At the end of the day, If your personal agenda does not fit this event, we simply ask that you do not come to the zoo that day.
It would be a shame to never allow your children back to the zoo because of one simple event.
Happy Pride Month.
So there it is.
There it is.
There's the tyranny of will.
You see it again.
Because it's the emotional manipulation there.
They say, look, we know that the community doesn't want this.
We might even be willing to admit in private, in an honest and candid moment, that this is a little weird and disordered.
But look, we want to have it.
We want to let these weirdos dress up like chicks and jiggle and twerk for little kids.
And we're going to do that.
And your only option is not to come to the zoo.
Well, it sure would be a shame...
If your kid didn't get to go to the zoo anymore, what?
You want to deprive your kid of the zoo?
It's the same logic they use.
Oh, it'd be such a shame not to let your kid see the animals.
It'd be such a shame not to let your kid go to the movies anymore just because they're turning every movie into some indoctrination session for radical leftist ideologies, including sexual ideologies.
For goodness sakes, there's going to be a lesbian make-out scene among lesbian toys in Toy Story.
They have to do it.
And they say, what?
You're going to deprive your kid of Toy Story?
We'll get to that in a second.
Well, they say with school.
What, you're going to deprive your kid of going to school?
Yeah, look, we've got to teach critical race theory in schools.
We've got to teach transgenderism in elementary schools and kindergarten.
We've got to empower the guidance counselors and the school administrators to trans your kids and to encourage them to go on puberty blockers and cross sex hormones, in some cases without your knowledge or consent.
We have to do all that, but what are you going to do?
You're going to deprive your kid of going to school?
What a bad parent you are.
Why is that the choice?
Look, we're just trying to be inclusive, man.
Look, we're just trying to inclusively and diversely and equitably trans your kids and convince them to discard everything you've ever taught them to believe and convince them to deny reality and to screw up their body chemistry for the rest of their lives.
That's all we want to do.
And you're going to deprive them of that?
No, I'm going to deprive you of your ability to do that.
That's what I'm going to do, actually.
Because we have the right, and frankly the obligation in our society, to tell these people, no.
The zoo wants to bring the drag queens to jiggle for your kids.
The community does not want the zoo to bring the drag queens to jiggle for the kids.
Reason and logic and morality and truth and virtue and all that good stuff is on the side of the local community and is against the side of the zoo and the perverts and the groomers and the weirdos.
So that's one mark for the local community.
And furthermore, the local community has political power.
At least it did until very recently, and I think it still does.
And I think what the local community needs to do is go in and call this zoo, Call up Zoo Montana.
I think the members of Zoo Montana should call this guy, Jeff Ewelt, and pull their donations.
I think they should call their state representatives, maybe their members of Congress, their mayors, their every elected official who is entrusted by the vote of the people with the public good, with ensuring the public good, and go in there and say, fire this guy.
Threaten to take away funding from the zoo and tell them to cut it out.
Do the same thing with Hollywood.
Do the same thing with the schools.
You've seen it work on the schools in Virginia.
You've seen it work in Florida.
Ordinary people still have some political power in this country.
You've just got to tell these little tyrants no.
I mentioned Buzz Lightyear a little bit earlier.
It was the new Buzz Lightyear movie.
I do not intend...
Well, I certainly don't intend on seeing this movie myself, and I don't intend on taking my little kid to this movie because the movie...
I love the Toy Story movies.
Certainly the first one was just great, but they're all pretty good.
They're all kind of the same movie, but they're all good.
And as always, the left has to take a thing that is good and popular and beautiful...
And then go in and suck out its insides and drain all the blood out of it and rot it out from the inside and just use it as a vessel to push its very radical political agenda.
Do you really believe that the story of Lightyear, of the prequel to Toy Story, that the only way to serve that plot is by inserting a lesbian kiss scene?
No, I bet it's completely extraneous to the plot.
In fact, the scene was cut previously, and then the Disney radical employees decided to throw a big hullabaloo about it, and so they put the scene back in.
Not to serve the story, not for the benefit of the audience, but just because of these radical leftist activists who worked for Disney.
So they put the scene back in.
I think now people ought to vote with their wallets.
Look, DW, we're out there making movies.
We haven't made kids content yet.
We're investing a ton of money in it right now, by the way.
We're going to have kids content very soon.
I wouldn't do this.
Furthermore...
I would go in and start exerting a little more political control over these movies.
I know this is anathema to some people who have imbibed a lot of the platitudes of the liberal left about how we should have no limits whatsoever on art.
That's totally bunk, man.
All good art, every single piece of good art that has ever been produced has limits on it.
And this is especially true of movies.
You're seeing it right now, by the way.
I think Lightyear has been banned in 14 countries.
Because these countries say, no, we don't want this woke stuff.
We don't want, this is just, we don't like it.
We're not going to do it.
We're not going to allow it in.
Tough stuff, Hollywood.
And Hollywood's willing to lose money if they can still push their woke ideology.
But, and by the way, Hollywood is, they fired Tim Allen, who originated the role.
He is the voice of Buzz Lightyear.
But they fired him.
Why'd they fire him?
They hired Chris Evans.
And you can't blame this on money.
You can't say Tim Allen was asking for too much money.
I strongly suspect Tim Allen negotiates for less money than Chris Evans does.
Chris Evans right now is a bigger movie star.
But Chris Evans is a big lib, and Tim Allen is an outspoken conservative.
And so it seems clear to me, clear as day, that they fired Tim Allen from his beloved and iconic role just for his politics.
And so what are we going to do about that?
We need to put limits on these things.
There was a period in the history of Hollywood called the Hays Code.
And today, whenever the Hays Code is invoked, kind of like McCarthyism, no one ever really explains what it was.
It's got this insinuation that it was really, really bad.
And we're not going to tell you what it was, but it was really bad, and censorship, and censorship's always bad, and so we've got to get rid of that.
The Hays Code was the greatest thing that ever happened to Hollywood and the greatest movies ever made.
Almost without...
There are some exceptions, obviously, because it was only a short period of time.
But a disproportionate number of the greatest movies ever made were made during the period of the Hays Code.
The movies before and after the Hays Code were worse in almost every case.
Before the Hays Code, which insisted on some standards in the movies, and it lasted from...
From 1934 to 1968, so about 34 years, decent period of time.
Before the Hays Code, movies were weird and creepy and degenerate and decadent.
There's a scene that goes viral sometimes.
Most people haven't seen the full movie.
It's called Freaks.
This is the kind of stuff you got before the Hays Code.
They'll make her one of us!
A loving cop!
A loving cop!
We accept a one of us.
We accept a one of us.
Goob-a-gobble.
Goob-a-gobble.
We accept her.
We accept her.
Goob-a-gobble.
Goob-a-gobble.
One of us.
One of us.
Who do you call it?
Goob-a-gobble.
They're going to make you one of them.
My big cop.
One of us.
One of us.
Goob-a-gobble.
Are you … Freaks!
Get both of you!
Not exactly the highest kind of art, is it?
It's just, I mean, the movie's called Freaks.
It was supposed to just be a freak show.
And there's no real logic or reason to it.
It's just a bunch of people who look kind of weird, just screaming, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, one of us!
And the whole point of that scene is to just be really weird and to not really partake of logic or reason.
Then you get the Hays Code.
Two years later, you get The Hays Code.
Five years after that, you get 1939, the greatest year for Hollywood movies ever.
1939, you get The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights, and that's not even the whole list.
You might say, oh, those are kind of old movies.
Compared to almost, well, certainly compared to any year in Hollywood history, but just compare any of those movies to any other movie.
They're some of the greatest movies ever made, and they were made with limits.
Like a sonnet.
Like poetry.
When poetry has some limits imposed on it, limits like rhyme, limits like meter, limits like a certain number of lines...
The poems tend to be better than slam poetry, which is the death of art.
That is the sort of thing that we might have to get back to, I think.
If we want good art...
If we want reason, if we want logic, what is logic?
What is reason?
What is truth?
What is goodness, if not a limit?
It's a limit.
It says, no, no, we're going to discard falsehood.
We're going to discard bad stuff.
We're going to discard ugliness.
We're going to kind of tamp that down a little bit.
It's a limit, but it's a limit that opens you up.
The Founding Fathers didn't talk about how we need to have licentiousness all the time and goobble gobble gobble one of us.
It said the opposite.
They said we need ordered liberty.
And it's not that there's a conflict here.
It's not that they're in opposition, order and liberty.
They actually work together.
The liberty that is exalting, that lifts your eyes up, that is ennobling, that is an ordered liberty.
This is a very basic idea.
This is right at the heart of Christianity.
Christ says, the man who sins is a slave to sin.
Some people think that sinning is a high form of liberty.
You know, you get to shoot up the heroin or whatever, or have a, you know, a thruple monkeypox party, or some goobble gobble gobble gobble.
That's not.
Anyone who's ever been in the throes of any semblance of an addiction knows.
It's actually slavery.
And it enslaves us to a culture.
It's decadent and weird.
That doesn't even make sense.
You can't govern yourself if you're in a culture where you can't speak and understand one another, where we're all just sitting around a table saying, Google, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble.
It's even hard to say it.
It's even hard to get those very words out.
If we want a society that is good and ordinary and lets us actually be free We need those limits.
And the libs know it too, by the way.
I'll just tease this story, but we'll have to get to it later this week.
The left, backed in large part by George Soros, is right now attempting to buy up all sorts of Spanish-speaking radio stations to censor them, to censor the conservatives.
We need to push for some action.
We need to stop Google gobbling.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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.
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.
Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
Today on the Matt Wall Show, detransitioners are speaking out to tell their horrifying stories revealing the reality of so-called gender affirmation surgery.
But trans activists and big tech are conspiring to silence these voices, as always.
Also, pro-abortion terrorists are promising to ramp up their campaign of violence and intimidation as we rate the decision on Roe.
And Ben Shapiro causes controversy by claiming that Disney has a gay agenda, even though Disney admits...
That it has a gay agenda.
Plus, a star NFL quarterback speaks out against the scourge of quote-unquote crazy guns.
In our daily cancellation, a TikTok star complains after being turned away from a horse ranch because she exceeds the weight limit for horses.
