Germany restarts the coal plants it just closed, the lesbian Lightyear movie flops, and Michael celebrates Juneteenth through Junetyfirst.
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A few years ago, Germany decided to phase out coal as a source of its energy.
This decision was driven by the German environmental movement, which was funded and encouraged by Russia, which does not care at all about the environment, certainly not Germany's environment, but does want Europe to be more dependent on Russian oil and gas.
The German government had already gone cold on nuclear energy years earlier, again, thanks to that environmentalist movement, and renewable energy is mostly a joke.
So by killing coal, Germany gave virtually all of its leverage on energy away to Putin.
Once Putin had all of the leverage, Putin invaded Ukraine.
But once Putin invaded Ukraine, Germany was pressured to stop buying Russian gas.
Now, Germany still needed the Russian gas, So Germany is today trying to restart the coal plants before the Germans freeze to death in the winter and before European resolve completely collapses on the sanctions against Russia, which means that Europe today is weaker economically and from a security which means that Europe today is weaker economically and from a security standpoint without any environmental
And the craziest part of it all is that Trump predicted all of it.
You know, everybody's talking about it all over the world.
They'll say, well, wait a minute, we're supposed to be protecting you from Russia, but why are you paying billions of dollars?
To Russia for energy.
Why are countries in NATO, namely Germany, having a large percentage of their energy needs paid, you know, to Russia and taken care of by Russia?
Now, if you look at it, Germany is a captive of Russia because they supply.
They got rid of their coal plants.
They got rid of their nuclear.
They're getting so much of the oil and gas from Russia.
I think it's something that NATO has to look at.
I think it's very inappropriate.
You and I agree that it's inappropriate.
That was Trump reaming out the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg back in 2018.
The pain that the West is experiencing right now is not a fluke.
It's not just dumb luck.
Aw, shucks.
Who could have guessed this?
This was all clear to everyone, with even a modicum of common sense.
The West's enemies are eating our lunch.
And we can whine about it, and we can cry about it, but we have mostly ourselves, or at the very least, our incompetent and corrupt ruling class, to blame.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday from Timothy Brinson who says, Joe Biden, running America is as easy as riding a bike.
That's not nice.
That's not nice.
It's pretty accurate.
It's as easy as riding a bike.
You never forget.
You never forget how to do it until you do.
And then you forget, and then everything falls to pot.
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And you can open There is one headline that has been cropping up.
I don't know.
Every three weeks, four weeks over the past several months.
And the headline is this.
Vladimir Putin dying from cancer.
Or Vladimir Putin dying from Parkinson's.
Or Vladimir Putin dangerously, gravely ill.
Irrational.
Not making his normal moves.
And I hate it.
I don't hate that Vladimir Putin is dying.
I hate the headline.
Because the headline to me is just the West making excuses for why we didn't predict what Putin is going to do.
Or actually, a lot of conservatives did predict what Putin was going to do.
A lot of conservatives said, if you give Vladimir Putin this oil pipeline that allows it to bypass Ukraine, it's going to invade Ukraine.
That's what the president of Ukraine says, for goodness sakes.
And the ruling class, the liberal ruling class in America and in Europe, they say, gosh, who could have predicted this?
I know why.
It's because Putin's acting completely irrationally.
It's because he's got cancer and he's looking death right in the face.
No, he's not acting irrationally.
He's acting very rationally.
Does Vladimir Putin have cancer?
Maybe.
I don't know.
Is Vladimir Putin on the brink of death?
I don't really think so, but maybe he is.
Regardless, the man is acting in a very rational way.
We're the ones acting irrationally.
We in the West, America too, but Germany also.
The West broadly.
It was irrational for Germany to give up its energy programs.
It was irrational for Germany.
It is irrational for Joe Biden right now to shut down American oil and gas, new American oil and gas leases, new American oil and gas pipelines, just so that we can buy more oil from Putin.
And when not from Putin, from Russia.
The Iranians, or from the Venezuelans, or from the Saudi Arabians, for that matter.
The Saudis who we have a generally pretty good relationship with relative to those other guys.
And even then, why are we buying the oil from them?
The oil from them doesn't pollute the environment, but the oil in America does.
That's irrational.
Putin trying to take back the old territory of the Soviet Union?
It's not good, but it's perfectly rational.
I get why he's doing it.
And if the West had taken Putin seriously and had taken geopolitics more seriously than we have in recent years, we probably wouldn't be in this position.
And now, when the West gets caught with its pants down, what do they say?
They say, oh no, it's because he's just acting like a madman.
He's not acting like a madman.
We're acting like madmen.
Maybe we should get our heads screwed on straight and stop putting our heads in the sand and And I don't know how many more metaphors I can mix, but start taking this stuff a little bit more seriously.
We'd be in much better shape.
Got to stop evading reality.
Do you know part of the reason why we can't game out Putin?
Or we can't game out Xi Jinping?
Or we can't act like responsible, serious people on the world stage?
Because we can't even figure out what a woman is.
And we can't figure out what a man is.
And we're wasting all of our time debating these stupid things that even a five-year-old knows.
That we no longer know.
The genius adults running our country no longer know.
This is one of the reasons that we need settled norms.
There are many good things about having settled norms.
One of them is that we don't waste our time.
A society that doesn't know what a man is and what a woman is cannot advance to more complicated questions.
It's sort of like in school, you've got to learn two plus two equals four before you can start looking at trigonometry or more advanced algebra or calculus.
You can't do those things until you figure out the basics.
If you're constantly stuck at the basics of statecraft, of the relationship of the individual to the state and to each other, you're not going to be able to advance to more complex questions.
And then what's going to happen?
Your enemies are going to eat your lunch.
These questions of norms are largely why the movie Lightyear just flopped at the box office over the Which, not to say I told you so, but I did predict that that would happen.
The Lightyear movie is the latest Toy Story movie.
It's a prequel.
And unlike the earlier Toy Story movies, which generally are good, certainly the first one is terrific.
I think number two is good too.
I don't think I saw number three.
Or was there a fourth?
There might have been a fourth.
But generally they've been good movies.
And then this one, they fire Tim Allen, who's the voice of Buzz Lightyear, and they fire him because he's a conservative.
It's the only reason that makes sense.
They didn't fire him because he was too expensive.
They hired a more expensive actor to do it, Chris Evans.
But Chris Evans is a huge lib, and Tim Allen is an outspoken conservative.
So they fire Tim Allen, and then they insist on inserting a lesbian kiss scene.
And it had initially been cut, but then the gay organization of Disney employees got very upset that it was cut.
And so for Pride Month and to spite Governor Ron DeSantis, they reinserted a lesbian kiss scene.
And then a bunch of conservative parents and normal parents and centrist parents and center-left parents even said, no, no, I don't think so.
Because it's not even just because we don't want to see lesbian toys kiss.
It's because it's not Toy Story.
It's because whatever this thing is, I know it looks like Toy Story, it's got the same characters and the same colors and the same animation, but it's not Toy Story.
Now it's the left using Toy Story, which is a nice, wholesome, normal story, to push its own woke ideology.
The box office estimates dropped 35% in one day.
Early Friday morning, heading into the weekend, the estimated box office was $85 million domestic.
Then, by the end of the day, the estimates had dropped down to $55 million.
The actual close was $51 million.
The estimates for the global box office was $135 million Then dropped down to $85.6 million.
Way, way down.
Wasn't even the biggest movie of the weekend.
So much money went into this movie.
So much hype went into this movie.
Didn't even clear the biggest movie of the weekend.
The biggest movie of the weekend was the new Jurassic Park movie, which did not open this past weekend.
It opened the weekend previously.
So the second weekend for Jurassic Park was better than the first weekend for the new Toy Story movie.
Why?
It's obviously just because of this fight over norms and over the gay kiss and the liberal actor playing Buzz Lightyear.
And it's because the left has misunderstood America's penchant for tolerance.
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Americans are very tolerant, but we do not want to normalize much of the stuff that we tolerate.
There's a difference between toleration and normalization.
And the Libs are banking on American tolerance in their campaign to normalize all sorts of behaviors.
But we don't want to normalize that stuff.
Americans like our norms.
Americans are happy to tolerate, especially on the sex issues, people's eccentric sexual desires and behaviors.
Everybody's got a gay cousin or something, and no one really cares.
We all just sort of tolerate it.
It's fine.
It's not a big deal.
We don't want the LGBT ideology being taught to our kids in public schools, in libraries, in the movies.
We don't want that.
We're happy to tolerate.
We'll tolerate the drag queen at the bar in Greenwich Village.
We'll tolerate that that exists.
We don't really care.
We will not allow that behavior to be normalized.
We'll tolerate transgenderism in the sense that if there's a mentally ill man who thinks that he's a woman, we're not going to go out of our way to get in his face and say, no, you're actually a man.
We're not going to do it.
You remember Ben Shapiro went viral earlier.
Some years ago, because he was on TV and this transgender dude was just getting all up in his face and yelling at him.
And Ben said, well, what are your genetic characteristics, sir?
He was being provocative because it was a TV show.
But he actually wasn't the one provoking the situation.
That wasn't an example of Ben being intolerant.
I'm sure that if Ben has said this himself, if he were at a dinner party and some dude in a dress asked to be called she, he would oblige in the moment in the dinner party.
But what is being asked by the TV debates over transgenderism and the transgender ideology in classrooms and libraries and movies is not toleration, it's normalization.
It's not just, hey, will you in your charity, in your grace, in your politeness, indulge some delusions of people at a dinner party?
Will you tolerate this strange behavior?
It is the demand that we actually lie and we actually pretend that it is normal for a man to think that he's a woman and that the man actually is a woman.
We're not going to do that, okay?
And I'm not just speaking for the right-wing conservatives here.
America is just not going to do that.
And that's why the Buzz Lightyear movie is not making a lot of money.
And it's why there's a parents movement in Virginia, in Florida, all around the country.
And the Democrats are shocked by this.
They're shocked because they overplayed their hand.
And yet the libs keep pushing this.
Joe Biden, in a Pride Month remarks, just came out and he said, the ultra-MAGA people now, we're the weird ones because we're going after Mickey Mouse because we don't want LGBT propaganda in the Disney movies.
No one knows better than the people in this room.
We have a lot more work to do.
A lot more work to do.
I don't have to tell you about the ultra-MAGA agenda attacking families and our freedoms.
300 discriminatory bills introduced in states across this country.
In Texas, knocking on front doors to harass and investigate parents who are raising transgender children.
In Florida, going after Mickey Mouse for God's sake.
That strike goes to home.
No, but think about this.
All of you in this room know better than anyone that these attacks are real and consequential for real families.
Ha ha ha ha!
They're going after Mickey Mouse for...
Yeah, because Mickey Mouse isn't Mickey Mouse anymore.
Just like Buzz Lightyear isn't Buzz Lightyear anymore.
You might look like Mickey Mouse.
He might have the sound of Mickey Mouse.
But the things that Mickey is pushing...
Are radical leftist propaganda.
Ha ha!
Men can really be women!
Ha ha!
Little kids should chop off their body parts!
Ha ha ha!
And take puberty blockers!
Ha ha!
Isn't that funny, goofy?
Ha ha!
No, man, you're like a weird demon Mickey.
You're not the real Mickey.
You're some bizarro world Mickey that has been hollowed out and had the essence of Mickey taken out of it.
And so what the left banks on is people's now generational affection for the Disney characters.
Which have now been murdered and have been hollowed out and the leftist virus has crawled inside and reanimated its corpse and it is just used to push radicalism.
That's what Disney is under fire for.
That's what Florida is pushing back against.
Florida says, don't teach five-year-olds weird sex stuff.
Disney says, we're going to put all the weight of our gigantic multinational corporation behind a campaign to undermine the voters of Florida.
And then Florida says, no, you're not.
No, we're going to actually take away some of your tax incentives.
We're going to fight back.
We're not going to let you do that.
And so the White House takes the side of the big, woke, crazy, multinational corporation trying to groom the kids and it's not working.
DeSantis is very popular in Florida.
The politicians around the country who are taking the side of parents and opposing the woke corporations This is great news for DeSantis, by the way.
Ron DeSantis is one of the most talented young politicians I've ever seen.
This guy somehow is at the center of every national news story, and Joe Biden clearly sees him as a threat.
That's why the sitting president of the United States, the incumbent who at least says that he's going to run for re-election, keeps going after DeSantis.
DeSantis is playing this Not only is he doing the right thing here, but politically he's doing the smart thing.
DeSantis has also just made a very smart political calculation that not a lot of people are picking up on.
DeSantis just came out during a press conference about an infrastructure plan and decided to talk about the recent elections in Colombia.
I just want to say, on behalf of the people of Florida, we watched the election results down in Columbia.
And we have a lot of great Colombian Americans here in our state who were very concerned about what was going on.
And I think the results of that election have been very, very troubling.
For people that believe in freedom in the Western Hemisphere, to elect a former narco-terrorist and a Marxist to lead Colombia is going to be disastrous.
And so we've stood with the people here in Florida that have ties to Colombia.
We've had a great relationship with Colombia as a state.
We were all hoping that the outcome would be different.
But we've got a problem in the Western Hemisphere with Marxism and totalitarianism really spreading.
We thought, you know, 25 years ago, the Cold War and all this stuff, and it just keeps rearing its head.
So we'll continue to stand with the people of Florida here who are passionate about freedom in the Western Hemisphere, particularly in Colombia, but very, very disappointing and very, very troubling result in that election.
Why is the governor of Florida talking about the Colombian election?
Florida, last time I checked, doesn't have a foreign policy.
It's got a lot of foreigners and then people who become Americans.
But the foreign policy is conducted by the federal government, not by the state government.
Why is Ron DeSantis talking about this election in Colombia?
It's because...
After the Cubans, Colombians are becoming one of the most important demographic groups for movement from left to right, Democrat to Republican.
The Republicans have long counted on the support of Cubans.
Historically, this has been the one Hispanic group that supports the Republicans in large numbers.
That's why it's the one Hispanic group that the Democrats hate.
That's why Barack Obama, while he was flooding the country with Hispanic illegal aliens, decided to make it harder for Cubans to come into America because he doesn't like those Cubans because the Cubans vote for Republicans.
Well, Colombians, after the Cubans, are an important group of Hispanics that have moved I mean, Hispanics broadly have moved to the right over the last three years, but Colombians in particular have done that, and Colombians are an important constituency in Florida, and Colombians still are paying attention to what's going on in their old country, and DeSantis is signaling to them, I stand with you guys, I stand against the radical leftist Colombians who are still back there in that country who just elected a Marxist.
The reason this matters is it shows you that while DeSantis gets the issues right, and he's able to play the media very well, he is focused on the minutiae, on the nitty-gritty of going into these individual groups and winning them over, just as DeSantis has, I think done a very, very good job of winning over important constituencies in the conservative movement, groups in the media, groups in the think tanks.
Ron DeSantis has systematically gone in and won those groups over.
So too, he's doing that down to the ethnic groups, down to the geographic groups.
It shows you that this is a calculated politician.
And if the other candidates who are looking at 2024, including Donald Trump for that matter, If they want to stop the DeSantis momentum, they've got to get that granular, too.
Because this guy, every day, this guy wakes up and he says, what can I do today that will put me closer to the 2024 Republican nomination?
And so far, he's done a very good job of putting himself in that position.
Now, when we want to fight back on the culture, when we want to settle all sorts of norms, okay, how do we do it?
We don't just criticize the culture.
We go out and we make the culture.
We go out and make movies.
One of the great movies we've made recently is What is a Woman by Matt Walsh.
If you want to watch that movie and others, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
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I say with no false modesty, but true humility, I think we've done a decent job so far.
I think we've really made a difference in the culture.
We need your support to continue doing that, and we will keep producing content that I think moves the needle forward.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
I'm so sorry it has just come to my attention that I forgot to wish you all a happy Juneteer 1st.
It is Juneteenth today.
We are observing the holiday.
Yesterday was Juneteenth.
I also didn't mention Juneteenth.
And then, of course, Juneteenth was the day that the federal government has decided that we would celebrate Juneteenth, which is now a federal holiday.
It occurred the day before on a Sunday.
And so Juneteenth was observed on Monday, Juneteenth.
And we are now discussing it here on Tuesday, Juneteenth.
And depending on how you react to this segment, I might be able to answer more of your questions tomorrow on Juneteenth.
Juneteenth before Juneteenth and Juneteenth.
I know that Republicans want to embrace Juneteenth.
There are many Republicans who are embracing Juneteenth.
You know that really sacred feast day that no one had heard about until five minutes ago when the Libs invented it?
Republicans want to embrace Juneteenth because, one, it's supposed to be about freeing the slaves.
The Republican Party freed the slaves.
And two, we just don't want to be called racist.
We are called racist all the time, unjustly, by the Dems, and it bothers us even when we say that it doesn't bother us, and we want any opportunity to show the libs that we're—actually, Democrats are the real racists, and we're not racist, but it's just—Juneteenth is just a bad idea.
It's a dumb holiday, and the only point of Juneteenth is to make slavery, to put slavery more at the center of the American story, to emphasize the role of slavery in America, and crucially to emphasize the importance of the legacy of slavery when crafting all of our future policies.
The holiday is not about celebrating America for abolishing slavery, because it theoretically could be about that, If you had a holiday just to celebrate emancipation, then you could say, well, yeah, it's about how great America is for abolishing slavery.
But that's not what it's about.
Did you Google Juneteenth on Juneteenth?
I did.
I Googled Juneteenth.
And there was a new doodle or a new animation on Google that was all sorts of African flags.
The kind of African black nationalist flag.
The red and the green and the black.
And it was there.
And those were all the colors that you saw on the image search, on the page itself.
It wasn't a lot of American flags.
It wasn't...
Why is it that Juneteenth was pushed by the Libs?
Some conservatives acquiesced to it, but it's not like this was a movement that came out of the conservative side of the aisle or the Republican Party.
It was pushed by the libs, and the libs are the ones that celebrate it.
Why?
Because the point of the holiday is to say that America is all about slavery.
Slavery not only was not unique to America, but it's not even particularly distinctive.
I don't need to tell you this.
I've said it many times.
But every country in the history of the world has had slavery at some point.
Many countries still do.
What makes the West unique is that we abolished slavery.
Slavery still exists in Africa.
It still exists in Asia.
It still exists in certain indigenous cultures.
And yet, the left in this country, which hates America, tries to make slavery the entire American story.
So I just think it's a bad idea.
It's also historically a sort of dumb day to celebrate the end of slavery, because it doesn't mark the end of slavery.
Slavery, you could say slavery ends with the Emancipation Proclamation.
That happened before Juneteenth, long before Juneteenth.
You could say slavery really officially ends with the passage of the 13th Amendment that happens after, long after Juneteenth.
Juneteenth is just the day that the mail got to parts of Texas to tell the slaves that they had been freed prior.
It has been, in some parts of Texas, a local tradition dating back some time, in a lot of the state decades, but you could say in parts even earlier than that.
But the only reason it's a federal holiday now is to dunk on America and make America seem worse and more evil and say that America's best days are going to be ahead of us and the past was awful and we're an enslaving, terrible country.
So I get it.
I know conservatives want to enjoy Juneteenth, but it's not there.
As I've said, I get the argument for Juneteenth because...
Black people have a unique position in America in that black people, the ancestors of black people were not People who chose to come here, they were in large part brought here involuntarily.
And I am not one of those conservatives who says that, you know, well, that was then, this is now, forget about the past, let's only focus on the present and the future.
There might be some practical wisdom to that, but also history matters.
I get it.
Is there any more conservative point of view than to observe that history and tradition and culture and the link between the generations actually matters?
No, of course all those things do matter.
But the point of emancipation, the point of the 13th Amendment, the point of the Reconstruction era, is to say black people are Americans now.
We have settled that question.
And so your Independence Day is the same Independence Day as the white people.
It's the same Independence Day as everyone else in America.
It's July 4th.
That's the day we're going to celebrate.
By creating a separate Independence Day, which is what Juneteenth is, the law creating Juneteenth says it's the Juneteenth National Independence Day, Is to say there's a separate Independence Day for black people.
That black people are not really Americans.
We're not all just Americans.
There's actually a big distinction and we're never going to come together and we're never going to be a real country.
That's what the left wants it for.
And that's a bad idea.
It's not a good idea.
So it's a bad holiday.
I much prefer Juneteenth and Junete first and Junete second.
Speaking of slavery and the legacy of slavery, Ibram X. Kendi, one of the most successful hustlers, huckster, con artists in America, who's really enriched himself on white guilt and liberal prattling on about slavery and the legacy of slavery and race politics.
Ibram Kendi says that the fight...
To free the slaves is being reenacted today in the fight to take away your AR-15s.
I know you have a six-year-old daughter.
So I wonder, how are you going to teach her what this holiday is?
Well, I'm actually going to teach her that it's Freedom Day and that throughout this nation's history, there's been two perspectives on freedom, really two fights for freedom.
Enslaved people were fighting for freedom from slavery.
And enslavers were fighting for the freedom to enslave.
And in many ways, that sort of contrast still exists today.
There are people who are fighting for freedom from assault rifles, freedom from poverty, freedom from exploitation.
And there are others who are fighting for freedom to exploit, freedom to have guns, freedom to maintain inequality.
So I really want to get her to understand that there are multiple kinds of freedom As with almost everything Ibram Kendi says, this is a giant, dumb point.
A dumb, stupid point with a little kernel of a smart point hidden in there.
So the comparison between taking away people's guns and freeing the slaves is not only a silly and absurd comparison, but they're really sort of opposite points.
To have a gun, the whole reason to have a gun, right there in the Second Amendment, is to protect yourself.
It is to give yourself some independence so that you are not easily enslaved and controlled.
It's not to go hunting.
It's not to go shooting clay pigeons.
It's to protect yourself.
It's to defend your freedom, even in that traditional understanding of freedom.
But the smart point Hidden inside all of Kennedy's stupid demagoguery.
Is that today, the way we talk about freedom is very relativistic.
The way we talk about freedom is kind of a zero-sum game.
When some people get freedom, other people lose freedom.
And so freedom is not reasonable.
It's not logical.
It's not tied to anything in objective reality.
It's just about different competing interests.
The interests between the slavers and the enslaved.
Between the people who want guns and the people who don't want guns.
The people who, I don't know, want drugs and the people who don't want drugs in the streets.
That's the way that we do talk about freedom today.
It's a stupid view of freedom, though.
Though it is how we talk about it.
The freedom of the transgender man, I'm sorry, transgender woman to use the women's bathroom, even though he's a dude.
The freedom of the transgender woman to swim on the girls' swim team, even though he's a dude, necessarily infringes on the freedom of the women to have their own bathrooms and locker rooms where they can change and don't need to have men expose their genitals to them.
Or infringes on the freedom of women to have their own swim teams and swimming leagues where they can win their own trophies and win their own scholarships and not constantly be beaten by men.
If freedom can describe all of those things, then yes, those freedoms are in conflict.
But that's why there is no such thing as a freedom to transgenderism, as a right to transgenderism.
The lib understanding of freedom as being able to do whatever you want to do and just follow your own desires is just a false one.
And you're especially seeing this here, and Ibram Kendi is accidentally proving it to you.
There's then the conservative understanding of freedom, which is that freedom is not sinning.
Freedom is doing good.
Freedom is doing what you're supposed to do.
The man who sins is a slave to sin.
That liberty, I've talked about this on the show many times, that liberty is not licentiousness.
That you don't have a right to do something that is unreasonable and not to your benefit, as Edmund Burke says.
You don't have a right to pretend to be a woman and go into the woman's bathroom.
You can't, because it doesn't make any sense.
Because it's not true.
Because you're not a woman.
That's why you can't have a right to that.
Even if some crazy activist with all sorts of crazy colored hair and lots of Lots of piercings or whatever, and mutilated body parts, says, I have a right to this.
Well, no, that's just a thing you're saying.
So you can say you have a right to, but why do you have a right to that?
There's no explanation.
But a right that is inexplicable, a right that can't have some grounding in objective reality in, say, the natural law, is no right at all.
So if we're going to talk about real freedom, if we're going to talk about real rights, we've got to ground it in reality.
And that means we need to discard probably 90% of the supposed rights that have cropped up in recent years and that continue to crop up every day.
Just like we need to discard 99% of the fake pronouns that have cropped up in recent years.
You can call yourself by those pronouns.
Yesterday we played a clip of a woman who calls herself, refers to her pronouns as bun-bun self.
Bun-bun self and fair self and all sorts of just completely made up words.
You can say that those are pronouns, but they're not actually pronouns.
Because pronouns are limited and they have something to do with objective reality.
There's a bell curve here for how to understand all of these problems in society, our rancor over race and sex, our divisions, our seeming inability to communicate on what constitutes a right and freedom and how we want to live and why we can't even decide what a man or a woman is.
Here's the bell curve.
You've got the guy at the really stupid end of the IQ bell curve.
And the guy's drooling and he can barely get his words out and he says, duh, it's because no one believes in God anymore.
Duh, it's because we're not going to church as much, right?
And then you've got the midwit in the middle who says, well, no, actually, you know, there are all sorts of social reasons and it's because of advanced capitalism and because of the way that the political economy is shaped and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then you get to the high part of the IQ bell curve and you get the really super smart genius and you know what he says?
It's because people don't believe in God anymore.
That's it.
That's what it all comes down to.
I don't want to sound like a Bible thumper, like I'm preaching.
I guess I am preaching to the choir.
That's just what it's all about.
All political disagreements, all human conflict comes down to theology and religion.
Why?
Especially when we're talking about Christianity, when we're talking about certainly what I believe to be true religion.
We're talking about a religion that worships the logos.
In the Gospel of John, they say, in the beginning was the word, and the word is, that's a translation of the word logos, the divine logic of the universe.
In the beginning was the divine logic of the universe, and the divine logic of the universe was with God and was God.
So this would be different than, say...
Islam, which views Allah as pure will.
Allah can do whatever Allah wants to do.
Allah, if he wanted to make his followers worship idols, that would have a sort of sense in Islam.
This was the subject of the Regensburg Address, wonderful address by Pope Benedict, I think probably the most important address of the 21st century, in which he quotes an Islamic scholar Ibn Hazm.
That's a difference with Christianity.
Where God is logic as well, and therefore there necessarily must be a logical coherence to God.
And we've got this Gallup poll right now.
As fewer Americans believe in God than ever before, expect society to make less sense.
Okay?
At this point, I'd take an Islamic society.
I really don't mean to diss the Muslims.
I have a great deal of respect for a lot of religious Muslims.
Because...
They believe in something and what they believe in has a certain coherence to it.
Certainly a hell of a lot more coherence than what the liberals are pushing right now.
It's just so amazing to me to hear from liberal people, liberal atheists, who will say, how can you believe in God?
That's so crazy.
You can't even see God.
I don't see physical evidence for God.
And you say, well, actually there is a lot of physical evidence and there's lots of...
Oh, hold on, wait, you're the people who believe in transgenderism, right?
So, you won't believe that God exists without a specific kind of tangible physical evidence that you're demanding.
But you will believe that a giant, husky, hairy dude is actually a woman in contradiction of all physical signs.
Make that make sense to me.
You cannot make that make sense to me.
It is truly shocking to me that anybody could believe such a thing.
But it makes sense because as belief in God goes away, that's going to affect everything in society.
Every settled thing, the relations between men and women, our understanding of our rights and where our rights come from, our traditions, our holidays, our feast days, the very language that we use to communicate notions of good and bad and right and wrong and true and false, all of that is going to be questioned.
None of that can be settled anymore.
And so we're going to be debating the most elementary things in our society constantly.
We'll have to try to prove it all through our unfettered reason.
But the stock of reason in each man is relatively small.
So when we don't avail ourselves of the wisdom of the ages and received opinion, then we're going to be trying to reinvent the whole world every single day.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin's going to be taking all of our energy.
Or he's going to be, rather, taking all of our money by selling us his energy.
You're going to have China taking huge swaths of our manufacturing and our intellectual property and advancing on our interests.
And we're not going to be able to do a damn thing about it because we're going to be here still arguing, duh, what's a woman?
What's reality?
Just all these things that we should have figured out.
When we were in kindergarten, at the very latest, but we have not been able to do that.
Preschool, we should have figured it out.
There's a video going around from Libs of TikTok, our great friends over there, of a preschool teacher, I guess a man, I think, a male preschool teacher who identifies as a woman who came out to his preschool students as trans.
Today on the last day, I finally decided to come out to my kids.
And my kids are older.
They're four and five.
And the way that I did it is just read them a book about this teddy bear that kind of comes out as a trans girl.
And it's really nice and it's very simple.
They understood it right away.
And I think what made me cry the most was that afterwards, like, I kind of looked at them and there was just this silence in the room and I just thought like, oh my god, now they see me.
As a totally different person.
And before this, they loved me.
I was such, you know, one of their favorite teachers.
And it felt so good to have that.
And I think that's one of the biggest fears I had is that as soon as they found out about me, they would lose all love for me.
And then one of my kids breaks the silence and she gets up and she just is like, she just hugs me.
And she's just like, everyone give Ruti a hug.
And they all came and they gave me a hug.
And she was just like, we love you.
Like, we love you so much.
Yeah, it made me really emotional and it was, I think, one of the biggest moments in my transition where I truly felt at peace with who I am and that even kids can understand it and even kids can accept me and so it doesn't make any f***ing sense when adults can't.
Because if a kid can, why can't a f***ing adult understand and accept?
Because kids are idiots.
That's why.
Why can a four-year-old or a three-year-old just unquestioningly believe that I am a woman, but an adult with developed faculties of reason and a clearer perception of the world doesn't understand that?
Because the kids are little tiny kids who don't know the difference between cartoons and reality.
This is a family show and kids listen to it, so I don't want to dispel some of the illusions of childhood, like certain characters and things.
But kids believe in a lot of stuff that isn't true.
And if you find yourself in a position where the only people who will believe your shtick, your perception of the world, are little tiny kids and people over the age of four do not, then you are little tiny kids and people over the age of four do not, then you should probably
Furthermore, if you need the affirmation of kids for your sex life, you should not be around little kids.
If you are breaking down in tears so happy when you make a sexual confession to three and four-year-olds and then they come up and hug you and that gives you a feeling of great pleasure and you're a man who thinks that he is a woman, I I think in this case, again, I don't really know the details of it.
You for sure should not be around kids ever at all.
You should be hundreds of yards away at any given time.
There was a clip.
Do you remember when Fox News ran that bizarre pro-transing the kids segment?
Just full-throated endorsement of transing little tiny kids the other day.
It was very strange.
And they haven't answered for it at all.
Tucker's been great on it.
Tucker's just sort of sub-tweeting them.
Tucker's just been running segments on why we should not trans the kids.
But anyway, Fox News ran this bizarre segment.
And at the end of it, the reporter who was pushing this stuff, he said, people only fear what they don't understand.
That's what this is about.
Which I guess can be true.
But people also fear things that they do understand.
I fear sharks.
If I'm in the water and I see a shark fin, I am going to fear that.
Not because I don't understand the shark, but because I do understand the shark, and I know that that shark wants to eat me.
And it is very much the same way with gender ideology.
We don't fear.
It's not even that we hold it in a probrium, and we want to stop it, and we fear what it could do to society.
We don't fear it because we just don't understand it.
I do understand it in as much as it can be understood.
It's the claim that a man can really be a woman, despite his body, because his body has nothing to do with his soul.
I get that.
That same heresy has cropped up many times over the last 2,000 years.
I understand that.
It's not a phobia.
It's a very legitimate, rational fear of what that can do to society.
Even beyond the sex question of screwing up the kids and sterilizing them and ruining their bodies and messing with their brains.
Just the very idea that the physical world has nothing to do with our true selves.
That idea when it has cropped up has really threatened civilization.
Sometimes we object to things because we understand them.
Actually, sometimes we need to elevate our thinking beyond the thinking of three and four-year-olds and beyond the same stupid basic questions that we shouldn't even be asking in the first place because they should be settled.
And only then can we think about more advanced things.
We can take on adult sort of behaviors and adult debates.
Or...
We can keep pretending that we're five years old and our enemies are going to eat our lunch.
The choice, I suppose, is ours.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
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