AOC and Ilhan Omar pretend to be dragged away from a protest in handcuffs, 47 Republicans vote to enshrine “same-sex marriage” into law, and new reporting makes the 22-year-old civilian who killed an Indiana mall mass shooter look even more heroic.
Become a DailyWire+ member today to access Matt Walsh’s documentary “What Is A Woman?” and the entire content library: https://utm.io/ueMfc
Check out Morning Wire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, DailyWire+, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
—
Today’s Sponsors:
Ring Alarm is an award-winning home security system with available professional monitoring when you subscribe. Learn more at www.Ring.com/KNOWLES
Shop auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers. Visit www.RockAuto.com and enter KNOWLES in the ‘How Did You Hear About Us' Box.
With thousands of satisfied customers and an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, Birch Gold can help you protect your savings. For your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit, text "KNOWLES" to 989898.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Yesterday, 17 House Democrats pretended they were living in the late 1960s as they pretended to be dragged away in handcuffs from a pro-abortion rally outside the Supreme Court, which they attended so they could pretend to defend legal abortion after the court overruled Roe v.
Wade and returned the issue to the legislature.
I feel like I'm doing slam poetry or something.
There's a lot of ends in there, you know?
In reality, they were not handcuffed.
You can tell because both Ilhan Omar and AOC briefly pulled their arms out of the pretend handcuff pose to make a black power fist for the cameras for some reason before they put their hands back and returned to the charade.
Even more bizarre than the mime show that they put on was the fact that they were at the Supreme Court at all, since the Supreme Court has nothing to do with whether or not there will be legal abortion in America or to what degree there will be legal abortion.
In the Dobbs case, the court said that the issue is for lawmakers to decide.
Lawmakers, you know, like AOC and Ilhan Omar.
If they wanted to enshrine legal abortion, these 17 House Democrats could propose a law and pass it.
And the Supreme Court would not do a damn thing to stop them.
They don't do that because they don't have the votes.
And they don't have the votes because this issue is a loser for Democrats.
So instead, they LARP.
They play pretend.
The cameras eat it up.
The media eat it up.
The only people who are not buying it are the American voters.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Frank S., who says, Not sure why the D.C. mayor is so upset.
She should be thrilled about the best doctors, lawyers, and engineers being bussed into her city.
Yes, it doesn't make sense, because the libs constantly say that unlimited illegal immigration is a net positive for our country, and diversity is our strength, and these are the most wonderful people in the world, and we should all be so glad to have them in our country, completely unvetted.
And yet, the libs who say that never seem to want the immigrants in their neighborhoods, or in their cities, or in their communities.
They only want them in the red states, and in the conservative places, and in the Republican states.
It's so weird, because the unvetted millions of illegal aliens are our strength, and they're so wonderful for strengthening America, and it's so great.
Bring that strength over to D.C., all of a sudden they don't want it.
Kind of tells you what they really believe.
Kind of tells you the whole thing is just a big trick for Republicans.
When you want to protect yourself from people that you don't necessarily want in your space, you should go check out Ring.
Right now, go to ring.com slash Knowles.
You've got to do it right now.
Summer is upon us.
People are traveling.
They're away from home.
And you all know about the Ring video doorbell.
Sure, you want to see and speak to whoever is on your doorstep, whether you are in the house or at your office or on vacation somewhere.
Which is what we should all be doing this summer.
One great reason to protect your home.
Did you know you can protect your whole home with Ring Alarm, an award-winning alarm system?
Protect your windows.
Protect your doors from fire, from freezing, from flooding, from everything, from the bad guys.
But did you know?
That you can go pro.
Be like me.
Become a pro.
Get Ring Alarm Pro and protect not just your physical home but your digital home as well.
CNET calls Ring Alarm Pro a giant leap for home security.
We are all busy during the summer.
We're going away from home.
We're traveling all over the place.
Protect yourself with Ring.
This busy summer season, protect yourself with Ring Pro.
That's right.
Ring Alarm Pro.
Go to ring.com slash Knowles.
Ring.com slash Knowles.
The only people who the Democrats are fooling at this point are the squish Republicans in Washington, D.C. I am convinced of that.
You look at the approval ratings right now among actual American voters, Democrats are in the absolute doldrums.
It's pathetic.
You can see through it.
The fake handcuffs from AOC and Ilhan Omar, the ginned up outrage, the lame excuses for why the economy and the rest of the society under Democrats is collapsing.
The American voters see through that.
The only people who get fooled are the House Republicans.
This was so pathetic.
This was so pathetic.
Last night, there was a vote in the House of Representatives.
The vote was to enshrine the radical new definition of marriage that the Supreme Court foisted on us in 2015 with Obergefell.
For all of human history until roughly seven years ago, it was understood that marriage is between a man and a woman, man and at least one woman, maybe more than one woman in certain cultures, but at the very least, that sexual difference Boys and girls, men and women coming together for the purpose broadly of procreation, family building, educating children, that that was essential to marriage.
And then starting about seven years ago, The Libs said, no, actually, that essential quality of marriage, that has nothing to do with marriage.
Marriage is just a union between any two people, and it's a contract, just like any other contract, but it's not like any other contract, and that's why we've got to redefine it.
And anyway, that's the new definition.
What's the new definition?
We can't quite tell you, but just go with us.
That's what they told us.
That's what the Supreme Court told us.
And the Libs pushed it, and the conservatives broadly resisted.
Last night in the House of Representatives, the Democrats brought up a vote on enshrining this new definition of marriage, this radical definition of marriage, of the fundamental political unit, into law.
And 47 House Republicans voted for it.
47 House Republicans did not vote to get the government out of marriage, which I think is an impossibility, but it's still a broadly popular position on the right.
They didn't do that.
They went much further than that.
47 House Republicans did not vote to accept the results of the Obergefell case from the Supreme Court.
That's not what this vote was about.
about.
They did a lot more than that.
They voted affirmatively to radically redefine marriage, family, the fundamental unit of society.
And they voted to do it for no reason whatsoever.
The Obergefell case is not in any way at risk.
The Supreme Court made that extremely clear in their Dobbs decision.
Justice Thomas is the only judge on the court who has expressed a willingness to revisit the Obergefell decision.
None of the other judges, none of the other conservative judges said that they would do They wouldn't sign on to the concurrence from Thomas.
There is no risk whatsoever at the moment or in the foreseeable future to that definition of marriage.
The Democrats only brought this issue up as a wedge issue to trap Republicans.
And these 47 useless squishes took the bait.
Hook, line, and sinker.
It is so pathetic.
What are their names?
I'm going to read their names out here.
Drives me so crazy.
It's so frustrating that these people, they can't win for freaking losing, these Republicans.
They take the bait every time.
They can't be counted on to conserve anything at all.
If you can't conserve the fundamental basic political unit, if you can't conserve the difference between men and women, you can't conserve anything.
So good, they're going to vote with us on tax cuts maybe sometimes.
Cool, great.
A lot of good that does.
Here they are.
These are their names.
Kelly Armstrong, Don Bacon, Cliff Bentz, Ken Calvert, Kat Kamek.
That's disappointing.
I like Kat Kamek, but it's very disappointing what she did.
Mike Carey, Liz Cheney, of course.
John Curtis, Rodney Davis, Mario Diaz-Balart, Tom Emmer, Brian Fitzpatrick, Andrew Garbarino, Mike Garcia, Carlos Guimenez, Tony Gonzalez, Anthony Gonzalez, Ashley Hinson, Daryl Issa, Chris Jacobs, David Joyce, John Katko, Adam Kinzinger, of course.
Nancy Mace, Nicole Maliotakis, Brian Mast, Peter Majer, Dan Muser, Marianette Miller-Meeks, Blake Moore, Dan Newhouse, Jay Obernolte, Burgess Owens.
Burgess Owens, come on!
In Utah?
Utah, they're going to vote to completely redefine marriage?
Scott Perry.
Tom Rice, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mike Simpson, Elise...
Oh, the rest of these squishes are lucky because my page cut out on my print.
You're lucky.
I know Elise Stefanik is the next one.
Okay, five or six Republicans are lucky that I don't get to read their names on air because this didn't print correctly.
Don't worry.
Maybe I'll read it tomorrow.
I'm just so frustrated with these guys.
The...
One, if you don't have the moral clarity on this issue, or at least the political clarity, to know, huh, this really matters.
I know a lot of Republicans want to say, oh, who cares?
It's not a big deal.
You know who cares?
The Democrats care.
The Democrats have been putting a lot of time and energy and focus into this issue for a long time.
And they care because they know that it matters.
Because if you can redefine men and women, then you can do anything.
You can take any amount of political power.
A lot of conservatives will say, well, look, I don't care about the marriage issue.
I just want to stop this crazy transgender stuff.
But what those conservatives don't realize is the transgender stuff is the marriage issue.
The marriage issue leads inevitably to the transgender stuff.
Because what the redefinition of marriage says is that men and women are exactly the same.
That there is no significant difference between men and women.
That's the only way that the union of a man and a woman that we call marriage can be the exact same as the union of a man and a man, or the union of a woman and a woman.
The only way they can be exactly the same, and we use the same word to refer to all of them, is if men and women are exactly the same, which is the essential premise of transgenderism.
That men and women are fundamentally the same, that's why a man can secretly be a woman and a woman can secretly be a man.
That's so frustrating that these people don't get it.
But they don't conserve anything and they don't even know how to play Washington games.
The Democrats are pushing this right now.
Not because it's an urgent issue.
Obergefell's not going anywhere.
They're pushing it right now because they're losing on every urgent issue before the country.
So they're just trying to find wedge votes.
And they know that the Republicans are split pretty much 50-50 on this.
I took my very scientific poll on Twitter the other day, and it reflected what people who have been looking at the numbers would expect from the GOP. The GOP is split here, and the Democrats don't want Republican unity going into the midterms.
And so these squishes here, they very easily could have said this is a ridiculous vote.
It's a show vote.
You Democrats are just putting us up to it.
We're not going to take the bait.
This is not an urgent issue.
The Republicans could have held firm.
But these ones can't because they care much more about what the New York Times says about them than what their own base says about them or what reality says about them or conserving a damn thing.
It's just so pathetic.
The only silver lining in this confusion and disappointment regarding the public view of marriage.
Is Bennifer.
That's the only silver lining, okay, when we're talking about marriage.
Yes, I meant to get to it yesterday.
I'm so glad I could get to it today.
After, what, 15 years?
18 years?
Two-thirds of my life, maybe?
Ben Affleck and...
What's her name?
Jennifer Lopez.
Jennifer Lopez Affleck.
They finally tied the knot.
So many years...
20 years after G. Lee took the silver screen by storm, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have gotten married.
When you want to protect yourself, not just your marriage, not just your heart, but your car, you've got to check out Rock Auto.
Head on over to rockauto.com, enter Knowles in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know that we sent you.
RockAuto.com We're good to
years ago, and that is to always give the customer exactly what they need in a very simple to navigate format with the lowest prices available.
I've had some friends who've made big mistakes.
They've gone to the brick and mortar auto parts store.
I kid you not.
One brick-and-mortar auto parts store wanted to charge my buddy $400 for a part that rockauto.com had for $150.
Don't make his mistake.
Go straight to rockauto.com.
Get everything you need.
The brakes, shocks, carpet, wipers, headlights, mirrors, mufflers, lug nuts, any other parts you need.
Write knolls in there.
How did you hear about us, Fox?
So they know that we sent you.
I actually do kind of care about the Jennifer Lopez Ben Affleck story.
I don't know anything really about these people's personal lives.
I assume they've all been married a hundred times.
I'm not totally sure that the Bennifer marriage that just took place is the most licit marriage in the world.
I think it took place in the Elvis Chapel in Vegas somewhere.
And these guys may have been married before.
Anyway, whatever.
The aspect of the story that I find somewhat heartwarming and actually important for the public to pay attention to...
Is they got back together.
Those kids finally worked it out.
These guys were both extremely famous, extremely successful.
I don't think they were married.
They were engaged.
They were dating.
And then they broke it off and they went with all sorts of other people.
And I'm sure that they gorged themselves on the pleasures of single life.
And even after all of that, They wound up back together.
They realized that something more valuable than just going and screwing around for your whole life and being single and just living for yourself.
Something more valuable than that.
Ben Affleck is a wealthy, famous man.
He could be dating or marry a 22-year-old of his choice right now.
That's just the way Hollywood works.
And he didn't.
They said the thing that's most valuable is...
It's that old thing, to get that old thing back again.
Someone with whom you have shared experience.
Someone that you've lived with for a little bit, to kind of come back.
I don't know the particulars of Bennifer, but I do know that's an important lesson for a lot of people, especially in our culture, which is a swipe right culture, where you're told that if you're dating someone in high school, it would be preposterous to think that you could ever marry that person.
Oh, that's what they did in the old days, before we had Tinder.
Now, oh no, you have to break up.
You for sure have to break up for college, and you've got to date 100,000 people.
And I don't even want to use the word date.
You should just be in a hookup culture, and you go out, and you go sleep with somebody, and then maybe you introduce yourself to that person the next morning when you wake up.
Possibly you go get breakfast.
But you don't really live for anybody else.
You certainly don't make any decisions that would affect your life for anyone else.
You don't make decisions about where you're going to live or your job, your career, your school.
You don't do any of that for anybody else.
You live entirely for yourself and for your career and the widget factory you're going to work at.
And then if a spouse fits into that picture, that's fine.
But maybe you're just going to live in a studio apartment forever and just keep swiping right, right, right and go on meaningless dates and have casual sex.
And then at the end, You will have, I don't know, gotten the promotion at work or something.
That's what our modern culture tells everybody to do.
You want to talk about radical redefinitions of marriage and the relationship between men and women.
That's a radical redefinition.
And what are the fruits of that?
People are getting married much later, if at all.
They're having many fewer children, if they have any at all.
And they're freaking miserable.
People are miserable.
They're depressed.
Antidepressant use is through the roof.
The average life expectancy in America is declining because of deaths of despair, because of suicide, because of drug overdoses.
Is this entirely about the collapse of the American family and the decline in marriage and the bizarre way that we approach sex and human relationships?
It's probably not entirely that, but I bet it's a lot of that because that's the central aspect of human life, without which all the money in the world means absolutely nothing.
Take that lesson from Bennifer.
And if Bennifer is an imperfect vessel for that message, learn the lesson anyway.
And also, when are we going to get the Geely reboot?
I am here for the Geely reboot.
It's been way too long.
Bring it on.
Speaking of heartwarming stories, this story about the hero in the mall in Indiana just gets better and better.
So there was a potential mass shooter in this mall in Indiana, and he did sadly manage to kill three people And he injured some other people.
But he only killed three people.
And he only injured, I think, five or so other people.
Because he was taken out.
Not by the police.
Not by gun control laws.
But by a good guy with a gun.
A young good guy with a gun.
Who was only carrying a gun because of the constitutional carry laws in Indiana.
So that's what we knew about this story.
Now it gets even better.
22 years old.
The guy's name is Elisha Dickon.
And he's walking around the mall with his girlfriend.
She spots the bad guy with the gun.
She says, I see a long rifle over there.
He tells her, get down, do not get up.
He gets behind some kind of edifice, a pole or something to that effect to give him a little bit more balance and a little bit of cover.
And he fires off 10 rounds from his Glock.
So he empties the magazine on the Glock.
He hits the guy.
Some reports are saying he hit the guy with all of the bullets.
I can't imagine that's the case.
Some are saying he hit him multiple times.
Some are saying he only hit him once.
All it takes is one hit.
The craziest part here is this kid, this 22-year-old with a Glock, with a pistol, in a combat situation, hit the bad guy from 40 yards away.
40 yards away!
If any of you have any experience with firearms, or maybe you go to the range, you know that is not an easy thing to do.
It's not an easy thing to do in the most peaceful, tranquil conditions of a gun range, much less in a combat situation.
Apparently, while the kid was firing, he made sure that it was clear behind the bad guy so he wasn't going to accidentally pop off a good guy, and he was waving for the civilians in the mall to get behind him and to exit.
This kid handled himself perfectly, and he took some amazing shots.
He has no training with the police.
He has no training with the military.
He learned how to shoot from his grandpa.
The reason this story really matters, other than it's amazing and they should make an action movie out of it or something, is everybody did everything right here.
Because, by the way, the girlfriend then, who the hero boyfriend saved, she's apparently a nurse.
She goes and immediately starts tending to people and caring for people.
And then we only know about this because she called her grandmother.
The grandmother would talk to the reporters.
And the grandmother said, you know, look...
This is amazing.
We're so proud of the guy.
We're so proud of my granddaughter.
But it's going to be hard for this guy because taking a human life, even if it's a guilty life, even if it's a potential mass killer, that's a hard thing to do.
So please pray for him.
Please pray for everyone involved.
And I read this story and I say, wow, everybody did everything right.
Other than the mass shooter, obviously.
Everybody did everything right.
The kid...
Who killed the shooter, the girlfriend who tended to the injured people, and the grandmother who said, just pray.
Please pray.
I'm praying.
You should pray too.
Prayers are efficacious.
Everyone did everything right.
My biggest takeaway from this story is that, not that these people got lucky, not what a miracle it was, though in a way it certainly does seem miraculous.
But what doesn't seem, the part that actually makes it seem not like a miracle, is that kid was prepared.
It's not just that he was carrying his gun around, not just that he was flaunting his rights.
That kid had earned the right to keep and bear arms.
That kid was exercising his right responsibly.
That kid had trained.
That kid knew how to use it.
Same thing is true of guns as is true of other features of life.
It's not the size necessarily that matters.
It's how you use it.
Okay?
You can tell that with a gun.
He just had a little Glock on him.
But he knew how to use it.
He was very well trained.
He was being a very responsible citizen.
This girl was being a very responsible citizen.
That's a lesson that we should all learn, okay?
If we want our rights, because this story completely undercuts the Libs arguments for gun control, completely undercuts the narrative that they've been pushing very hard for a couple of months now, but they've been pushing it for years, actually.
If we want our rights, we need to know how to use them.
If we want to be a free people and we want to have self-government, we need to be capable of that.
We go back to this John Adams quote a lot.
One of the implications of the John Adams quote when he says, the Constitution is built for a moral and religious people.
It's unfit to the government of any other kind of people.
Similar quotes from other founding fathers about how if we don't practice our liberty, if we don't practice the virtues, if we are not worthy of our liberty, we will lose it.
We will lose the ability for self-government.
That's just a fact.
That's how it goes.
If people are not virtuous, if people are not living up to their liberty, if they trade their liberty for licentiousness, then they're going to have a master.
They're going to be in need of a master.
They're going to deserve a master.
They're not going to have their rights.
This is a really, really great story.
And it backs up a poll that just came out.
There's a poll from the Convention of States Action and Trafalgar Group that surveyed Americans of all political persuasions and asked, who do you trust more in a mass shooting situation?
The feds, local police, or armed civilians?
And the poll was taken, I believe, before this shooting happened, or before the news reports of the shooting happened.
Who do you think won?
Well, let me ask you.
You're in a mass shooting situation.
What would make you feel better?
You've got local police nearby, you've got the feds showing up at some point, or you've got a good guy who's trained a civilian with a gun.
What would make you feel better?
It's easy.
And the majority of people surveyed gave the same answer.
The good civilian with the gun.
When you want to protect yourself from all these people in high positions of authority who don't deserve that authority, who are not exercising it with prudence and justice, you've got to check out Birch Gold.
Right now, text Knowles to 989898.
The latest inflation numbers are in...
Not looking good.
Okay, we've hit a 40-year high at 9.1% thanks to the geniuses in the White House right now.
Our nation's authorities are openly admitting that they completely blew it.
Quote, I was wrong about the path inflation would take.
Those aren't my words.
I was right about what would happen with inflation.
Those are the words of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
She said, quote, There have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy that have boosted energy and food prices and supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly that at the time I didn't fully understand.
Unanticipated by whom?
By you guys, not by us.
That's why it's so important to protect yourself.
You cannot rely on the experts and the authorities when it comes to your wealth, when it comes to your assets.
It's why you've got to go check out Birch Gold.
You should invest at least some of your money in gold and silver.
And I would strongly recommend the Birch Gold Group.
Protect your savings from a highly turbulent economy by diversifying your 401k or IRA into physical gold.
It's not too late.
Best time to do it was yesterday.
Second best time to do it is today.
Text NOELS to 989898.
Get a free info kit on diversifying and protecting your savings with precious metals.
Birch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Countless five-star reviews.
Thousands of satisfied customers.
Text K-N-O-W-L-E-S to 989898.
Get real advice from Birch Gold today.
That is Knowles.
Text it to 989898.
Claim your free, no-obligation info kit on protecting your savings with gold.
If you have not already heard, last month we launched Daily Wire Plus.
It's our ever-expanding multimedia universe, and the reason that the Daily Wire app on your phone now looks a little bit different.
Daily Wire Plus is everything you love about the Daily Wire, plus the new home of Jordan Peterson, PragerU, DW Movies, and coming soon, animated and live-action content for kids.
It's where you will find fearless documentaries, such as Matt Walsh's gripping, brilliant, unnecessary movie, What is a Woman?
There's a reason What is a Woman is currently one of the most streamed and talked about films of the summer.
Now is your chance to see why.
Watch What is a Woman by becoming a Daily Wire Plus member.
You can get 35% off when you sign up now.
It's time to build the future that you want to see.
Become a member at dailywireplus.com.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Who do you trust in a mass shooting?
41.8% of respondents say armed citizens.
25.1% of respondents say the local police.
10.3% of respondents say federal agents.
Then a fifth of the people choose none of the above.
Some people are surprised by this answer.
What do you mean?
You trust some wild American with a gun rather than the police?
Yes, of course.
First of all, the libs have been telling us for years now that the police are evil, racist Nazis who just go hunting innocent black men for sport.
The police are so unspeakably evil, that's why we need to give them a monopoly on the weapons.
Does that make sense?
No, of course not.
If anything, the anti-cop argument is going to increase one's faith in the Second Amendment and one's reliance on the Second Amendment.
But there's an even more basic reason here, which is the principle of subsidiarity.
It is good as a matter of government to have the broadest number of decisions that can be responsibly made, the greatest amount of power that can be responsibly exercised at the most local level possible.
And then certain things that the local level can't accomplish, you go up to a higher level, you go from the township to the state maybe, or the county, and to the state, and to the federal government.
And when we want to protect ourselves, we can't merely rely on, I don't know, the FBI jumping out of a helicopter and saving us at our mall shooting in Indiana.
And we can't even just rely on the state police, and we can't even rely on the county police, and we can't necessarily even just rely on the local police.
We need to be able to protect ourselves because self-defense is a natural right.
And this is one of the reasons why our Constitution recognizes the right to keep and bear arms.
The geniuses in the pundit class who are shocked by this, who want to take away all your guns, they don't understand this very basic principle that at least a plurality of Americans do understand.
Why would you trust the feds?
Why would you, especially after what we've lived through, For the past three years, COVID, the complete destruction of our economy.
Even going back a little bit further, the usurpation of power from a duly elected president, the intentional undermining of a major presidential candidate, spying on that candidate, trying to undermine his presidential administration while he's there.
Why would we trust the feds?
What the feds do, this is an amazing tactic, and the Democrats have really perfected it.
The Democrats will go in and screw everything up beyond your wildest imagination, and then they'll pull back a little bit from their agenda of utter destruction, and they'll loosen up a little bit, and things will get slightly better, and then they'll take credit for things getting slightly better.
That's what Joe Biden's just doing.
Gas prices are through the roof and driving lots of, well, the cost of really everything up.
The gas prices are up in many ways directly because of Joe Biden, because of his stupid energy policy, because he killed the oil pipelines, because he killed new oil and gas leases, because he took the sanctions off Putin and gave Putin a new oil pipeline, which directly caused the invasion of Ukraine, according to the president of Ukraine.
Because Biden literally invited Putin to invade Ukraine, Biden said, if Putin just invades in a minor incursion, that's okay, we won't do anything about that.
Because of all of these, and many other actions as well, energy has gone way, way up.
Now Biden is bragging because gas prices have declined somewhat from what we've seen in recent weeks.
And the way that he's bragging about it is even a head scratcher.
He says, I've been releasing about 1 million barrels of oil a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and rallied our global partners to release a combined 240 million barrels of oil onto the market.
Our actions are working and prices are coming down.
Classic Democrats.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there in case our nation goes to war.
Well, I guess we are at war right now with Russia through Ukraine.
We just haven't declared the war.
We have all sorts of wars of empire that are undeclared that we just engage in willy-nilly and that probably the majority of the American people oppose.
But we're not in a major existential war right now.
The homeland is not being invaded.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there for emergencies.
This is not an emergency, exactly.
The reason that Joe Biden is releasing a million barrels of oil a day, notably just until the end of October, is so that the Democrats can help stop the bleeding in the midterm elections.
Don't forget, when Joe Biden announced this in, what was it, April or May, that they were going to release a million barrels of oil a day, he said, we're only going to do it for six months.
That is, we're only going to do it up until the midterm election.
So it was so nakedly political, even in the moment, he's going to deplete our strategic reserves of energy So that he can, the gas prices can come down a very little bit.
What if he had dealt with the underlying problems?
What if he had allowed American oil producers to produce more oil?
Rather than begging these other countries to produce more oil.
What if he had done, and so he screws up everything.
And then he backs off a little tiny bit and prices come down what?
Like 10 cents or something?
And then he says, look, it's a big victory.
Prices for gas today at the pump are twice what they were on the day that Joe Biden took office.
They have gone up 100%.
And Joe Biden is bragging about that.
That's some great victory.
This is why the Republicans broadly are winning.
If you look at what's happening right now at the state level, it's unbelievable.
In Kentucky, Republicans have just gained a voter registration advantage for the first time ever.
Not okay.
We've rebounded.
It was bad during the Bush years, and then it, I don't know, or let's say it was, you know, the Democrats made big gains during the Obama years, but then now we're coming.
No, this is the first time ever that there are more registered Republicans in Kentucky than registered Democrats.
Now, Republicans have won a lot of elections in Kentucky.
But as a matter of registered voters, the Democrats had the advantage.
There are lots of reasons for this.
The charitable view is that Democrats are just much more focused on on-the-ground community organizing kind of political action, and so they tend to register more voters.
The negative view of this is that Democrats cheat and keep a lot of dead people on the rolls and buy a lot of voter registrations.
But anyway, we'll try to be charitable on the show.
Either way, it ain't working anymore.
You've now got more registered Republicans in Kentucky than Democrats.
The field is wide open for Republicans.
This is why you are seeing a number of people who might be interested in being president on the Republican side beginning to suggest that they will run in 2024.
You've seen Mike Pence make, I think, pretty unsubtle intimations this way.
Now you see it from Nikki Haley.
Nikki Haley just tweeted out, This was in response to the Iran deal, the potential reviving of the Iran nuclear deal.
Nikki Haley says, if this president signs any sort of deal, I'll make you a promise.
The next president will shred it on her first day in office.
Get it?
So Nikki is as clear as I can see saying, I am going to run for president in 2024.
Now, maybe it was just a throwaway line to gauge interest, but I don't know.
It seems clear to me that Nikki Haley would like to be president.
She's already been governor of a state of South Carolina.
She was a very popular UN ambassador under Donald Trump.
And I guess this is the real issue for her.
It's one of her great strengths.
Now it's become her weakness.
Nikki Haley had threaded the needle pretty much perfectly during the Trump years.
While lots of Republicans were completely destroyed by Trump.
Well, they were really destroyed by themselves and their own reaction to Trump.
Nikki Haley had done a very good job.
She was a relatively moderate governor of South Carolina, but she came into Trump's orbit and Trump named her the UN ambassador.
And she did a very effective job as UN ambassador.
And when she left the White House, she did so on good terms.
A lot of people who left the White House in prominent roles did so on very bad terms.
But Trump really seemed to like her and gave her a nice big press conference when she left.
And she had managed to play both sides and mollify both sides pretty well.
She...
But she made one mistake, which is she gave an interview to Politico after January 6th, where she really attacked Trump.
And this did not sit well in Trump world, and then she tried to walk it back.
So after that, she said, look, my words were misinterpreted, and of course, look, I don't put it past Politico to paint a Republican in the worst possible light.
But whatever Nikki said to Politico, she then said, no, come on, this is being misconstrued.
And she said, I will not run for president if Donald Trump runs.
But it seems like Donald Trump's going to run.
He's saying that he's almost certainly going to run.
And now Nikki is suggesting that she might run anyway.
So she's got this problem, this political problem, which is she has to pick a lane.
I think at this point she has to pick a lane.
And she has a good play for the moderate lane of the Republican Party.
She's probably the leading moderate candidate in the Republican Party.
But the problem for that is it's not a moderate year, probably.
If the election were held today, the moderate candidate almost certainly would not win.
Now, she could make a play for a Trump-friendly candidate.
But if she's a Trump-friendly candidate, then she can't be president because Trump is almost certainly going to run.
Unless she's betting that Trump is only pretending that he's going to run, but he's not actually going to run, in which case she could be trying to make a play for Trump to tap her as his successor.
Or some other strategy.
But all of these strategies are mutually exclusive.
She's going to have to make a play for what kind of candidate she is going to be in 2024, if she is going to run.
And it's not just Nikki Haley that's dealing with this problem.
Ron DeSantis is dealing with this problem.
He, I think, knows what kind of candidate he's going to be.
He is running as the Trump successor, the heir apparent.
The problem is, Trump might not want an heir apparent just yet.
People who are still interested in wielding power don't always like it when there are heirs.
Sometimes they're a little tough on their heirs.
They try to kick them out of the political scene.
At the moment...
Nikki Haley doesn't seem to have a clear lane.
And this is true of a lot of Republicans.
So at the moment, I know a lot of people have their preferred candidates.
A lot of people probably like Nikki Haley.
A lot of people like Ron DeSantis.
A lot of people like Ted Cruz.
A lot of people like, I don't know, any of the other candidates too.
But right now, Trump is the dominant figure in the field.
And because he's an agent of chaos, until he settles down into what he's going to do, which is probably going to be very late in the game, I don't even know if he goes by Prince anymore.
The artist formerly known as Prince Harry has left the United Kingdom because he married that awful woman and now they live in America together because she didn't want to be a princess.
She just wanted to play one on TV. And so he's come to America.
He's lived here for five minutes and he's decided to take to the UN to scold America for not killing as many babies anymore.
This has been a painful year in a painful decade.
We're living through a pandemic that continues to ravage communities in every corner of the globe.
Climate change wreaking havoc on our planet, with the most vulnerable suffering most of all.
The few weaponizing lies and disinformation at the expense of the many.
And from the horrific war in Ukraine to the rolling back of constitutional rights here in the United States, we are witnessing a global assault on democracy and freedom, the cause of Mandela's life.
So Prince Harry, I think, is referring to the Dobbs decision here.
I think so when he's saying a rolling back of constitutional rights.
What could he be talking about?
He's not talking about the Second Amendment rights.
I mean, there was a court decision that just increased that constitutional right.
He's not talking about religious liberty.
There were two court decisions that just increased those constitutional rights.
I'm not sure that Harry agrees with either of those, but you couldn't say that that was a rolling back of constitutional rights.
The only one where you could pretend it was a rolling back of constitutional rights was the abortion case.
Because it said, no, there's not actually a constitutional right to abortion.
So Harry shows up and it's so ugly and he shills at the United Nations for killing more babies in the United States, a country he's lived in for two seconds.
And not only is this a case of an immigrant coming to America in search of a better life, this is a man who was a representative of his nation.
His family embodies the nation.
He's from the royal family, and he was senior royal.
And he has the temerity to come here and lecture us.
Now, what's really funny, a lot of news organizations played the hairy speech at the UN as though he was speaking to the General Assembly.
This is a world-shaping speech.
If you look at the other camera angle, if you look at the camera angle into the room, Nobody was there.
How many people are in that room?
Fifty?
Maybe?
It's so sparse, the number of people who are in that room.
So nobody cares what Prince Harry has to say.
Nobody is really showing up for this.
It doesn't matter.
But he is a good tool for the liberal establishment, and so they air him and try to make him seem more influential than he is.
What bugs me most about this It's not just the silly environmentalism.
It's not even the shilling for the abortion industry and the moral arguments for killing lots of babies.
Those are unpleasant, too.
It's the disloyalty that I find so distasteful with Prince Harry.
He's so disloyal.
He throws his family under the bus as his grandfather is dying, as his grandmother, one of the greatest women in public life of the last century.
This woman is 96 years old and he just roils the family and he's disloyal.
He throws all this dirt on his own family and he moves to America.
And then the second he moves to America, he's disloyal to America and just starts spewing all this bile at the country that was nice enough to take him in.
Though I wouldn't say we took him in all that willingly.
I certainly don't.
I'm not glad that he's here.
Listen, maybe we should ship him to Washington, D.C.
If we're going to ship the Guatemalans and the Nicaraguans and the Salvadorans who come across the border illegally, let's ship this limey too.
You lives like him so much, you deal with him.
They'll kick him back.
They'll deport him in two seconds.
Speaking of disloyalty, I just read the saddest article I may have ever read in my life.
This is in the New Yorker.
And it ties into all these discussions on marriage and human nature and sex and sex politics.
A hookup app for the emotionally mature.
Modern romance can feel cold and alienating.
Field, by encouraging open-mindedness and respect, suggests a way forward.
It's written by a woman, Emily Witt.
I'll just read you the first paragraph.
This thing goes on forever and it just gets more depressing the more you read.
It says, Still existed, but was no longer my home.
I could get a glass of cold Prosecco at my favorite bar, but the people I used to see there seemed to have vanished.
It did not take long to understand that there would be no ladder back to the world I had known, and that the portal to whatever it was that came next was probably going to appear on my phone.
This is when I downloaded a dating app called Field.
Field describes itself as technology for, quote, open-minded singles and couples who want to explore their sexuality.
You find out later on that Field started out as a threesome app.
It was an app for people who wanted to have threesomes.
It was called Thrinder, I think, and then there was a cease and desist from Tinder, the other dating app, and so they had to change the name to Field.
And the headline here is a hookup app for the emotionally mature.
And what you find out during the reading of the These are the most emotionally and spiritually and personally immature people ever.
This first paragraph, it almost reads like satire.
Like a satire of what it means to live in Brooklyn these days as a millennial.
Even just the way she talks, she doesn't say, my husband left me.
She doesn't say, my love affair left me.
Collapsed.
She says my relationship.
The relationship that I had been in abruptly collapsed.
And so I went back to my plant and my cats.
And I went to the place where I would get my Prosecco in the neighborhood.
But the people that I was waiting to see, they weren't there as much anymore.
And she's blaming this on COVID. But it's so much sadder than that.
Because COVID has nothing to do with this.
That's called getting older.
That's called...
Life.
As you get older, not everything stays the same.
In fact, almost nothing stays the same.
So you go to the bar and fewer and fewer of your friends are there.
And you say, hey, let's go get a drink tonight.
And fewer and fewer people can do it because people go off and they get married or they move for a job or they move on with their lives.
And disproportionately, it's people in New York, often in Brooklyn, actually, like this woman.
But disproportionately, it's these sorts of people.
People who are doing the kind of coastal, cosmopolitan, elite jobs who don't grow up.
The rest of America tends to grow up.
And they go and they get married and they get a job and they have kids and they kind of grow up.
These people don't.
And they get very sad because their life is changing.
And so if they were emotionally mature, what they would do is they would try to Improve their lives and edify themselves and have more stable relationships and maybe have that relationship move somewhere toward marriage.
Marriage isn't for everybody.
Maybe they say, I'm going to be single, but I'm going to consecrate myself in single life.
I'm going to do something for God, hopefully.
Certainly something bigger than myself.
I'm not just going to live for my cat and my Prosecco anymore and my New Yorker articles.
But a lot of people can't do that.
And so, what does this woman do?
She does the opposite.
She goes to the threesome app.
And she describes having a threesome.
She goes and she meets this couple at a bar and they go and they have a threesome.
And it's so sad because she says, you know, the sheets felt nice in their apartment and they made me a nice dinner and then that was it.
But I realized, you know, I felt like kind of an imposter and it didn't do it for me.
But she never comes to the right conclusions.
She never says, okay, I should go get married.
Because we've lost so much of our understanding of what marriage is, of what life is about, of what growing up means.
We don't grow up anymore.
Sometimes you'll hear people say, it brings us right back to those squish Republicans who voted for the Democrats' redefinition of marriage earlier.
They'll say, well, you know, listen, marriage has lost so much of its meaning in recent years.
You know, you've got divorce, rampant divorce, galore, no-fault divorce, you've got this whole culture of selfishness, so why shouldn't the gays get married?
You say, oh, you know, you're raising some interesting points, but you're coming to the opposite conclusion.
One, the answer as to why the gays can't get married is not because we don't like gay people or we don't want them to be happy or anything.
It's because it's ontologically impossible.
Because marriage involves sexual difference.
And so if you don't have sexual difference, you can't get married.
By definition.
You can try to redefine it.
You can try to say, well, no, marriage is different now.
But it is a thing.
Marriage is a thing.
And no matter what we say, no matter what the Democrats and 47 Republicans say, that's not going to change.
Because the structure of reality isn't going to change.
I can call this tumbler a microphone.
It isn't a microphone.
It is a tumbler.
It is what it is.
But furthermore, to this point, the people who raise these objections have a good point.
We have weakened marriage.
We have lost sense of what marriage is.
We've lost sense of what the purpose of marriage is.
We've lost sense of what the purpose of our own lives and our relationship to our sexuality and the relationship to our fellow human beings and our relationship to our political community is.
Because marriage is a political institution.
That's why you do it in public.
That's why you take vows before God, before the public as well.
That's why you sign the register.
When states had established churches, then you would do it in the church, and that satisfied the state.
When the state stopped establishing churches, you would register with the state as well.
That's been true in every society for all of human history.
People say, we've weakened marriage.
You're right.
That's the problem.
The solution is not to further confuse marriage or to further abolish marriage.
The solution is to strengthen marriage.
You're right.
It's really sad that people are living this way.
Don't take my word for it.
They are sad.
They are the ones who are taking more and more depression pills.
They are the ones who are not living as long because of deaths of despair.
They are the ones who are reporting to social scientists decreasing levels of happiness.
You're right, and I think it has to do with alienation.
I think you're right.
I think it has to do with a lack of community.
I think you're right.
I think it has to do with the collapse of the essential community institution.
The solution is not to blow that up completely.
The solution is to try to take it back and build it back and to have a more coherent culture.
And if not, even the conservatives can be counted on to get that.
Who can?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
So, see you tomorrow.
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, top HHS official Rachel Levine appears on TV yet again this week to push castration and sterilization on kids, but instead of being a high-ranking federal official, Levine should be in prison.
We'll talk about why.
Also, 47 Republicans get on board with the federal government redefining marriage.
Many people on the right have changed their minds on the marriage issue in recent years, but why?
What compelling argument convinced them We'll try to figure that out.
And the heroic squad led by AOC are arrested and frog-marched in front of cameras with invisible handcuffs.
A harrowing scene indeed.
Plus, CNN discovers something known as summer and blames it on climate change.
