Democrats pass a massive “Inflation Reduction” bill that won’t reduce inflation, Kim Kardashian and Skete Davidson call it quits, and Visa demonetizes a major porn site.
Stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you. Get your Jeremy’s Razors today at ihateharrys.com.
—
Today’s Sponsors:
Protect your online privacy with ExpressVPN. Visit EXPRESSVPN.com/KNOWLES for 3 Months FREE.
A social media app that breaks the mold of advertising-based revenue. Try Tuvu FREE for seven days at https://www.tuvu.com/knowles
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Senate Democrats just passed a $740 billion bill called the Inflation Reduction Act during a 16-hour marathon voting procedure known as VoteArama.
The bill does a lot of things.
It sets aside $369 billion to line the pockets of the Democrats' pals in the green energy industry.
It extends Obamacare subsidies for an extra year.
It raises all sorts of taxes on different groups and corporations.
It even increases taxes on gas and oil imports, which is pretty wild because gas and oil prices are probably the single greatest driver of inflation.
So you're gonna raise taxes on that, not gonna make the costs go up.
Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Pretty much, pretty much the only thing that the Inflation Reduction Act does not do is Is reduce inflation, as the Penn-Wharton budget model showed last week, and as 88% of Democrats already know, according to a recent YouGov poll, and as even Bernie Sanders admits when he refers to the behemoth legislation as the, quote, so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
These are not my words.
These are not the words of Ted Cruz or Donald Trump.
These are Bernie Sanders' words, quote, I say so-called because according to the CBO and other economic organizations that have studied this bill, it will in fact have a minimal impact on inflation.
It's not my best, the Fauci is better, but you get the point.
The Democrats voted for this stuff anyway.
And they voted for it not because it will reduce inflation, but because it gives them a lot of the dumb legislative agenda that they've wanted for a very long time.
Even leading Democrats cannot muster an economic argument for it.
Least of all, Joe Biden.
Seven Nobel laureates on the economics, I should say.
Not only can Joe Biden not muster an economic argument for the bill, he cannot even say the word economic.
The whole sorry spectacle is just more evidence of a disturbing trend that I have mentioned on this show before.
The libs are not even trying to make arguments anymore.
This is a really big shift and very few people are talking about it.
In the old days, the libs would at least try to mask their power grabs and their personal interests in the language of logic and reason and the common good.
Usually it was BS, but hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
Increasingly, today, that kind of language is gone.
The arguments are gone.
Even the facade of reasoned debate and civic spirit is gone.
Now, in lieu of an argument, the libs are just redefining all the terms.
Can't argue why men should be allowed into the women's bathroom?
No problem.
Just redefine women.
There you go.
You don't need to make an argument now.
Can't explain why your crappy economic policies destroyed the economy?
Oh, that's not a big deal.
You just have to redefine recession.
Then, presto chango.
No problem.
And now, we'll just keep refreshing Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster because sooner or later, they're going to redefine inflation, too.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment on Friday is from Harry Martins, who says, imagine had Brittany Griner been caught in Singapore or Malaysia.
Russia right now looks like a walk in the park by comparison.
That's true.
We'll get to Brittany Griner maybe a little bit later in the show.
But people are talking about how this is the end of the world.
Brittany Griner has been sentenced to prison because she smuggled drugs into Russia.
Other countries would be harsher, okay?
Russia's not even the harshest country on drugs.
People talk about America's drug policy as being an outlier.
Yes, it is an outlier, not in the harshness we have on drugs, but in our leniency.
We are insanely lenient on drugs.
That's a lot of the reason why our life expectancy is declining, because so many people are hooked on drugs and ODing left and right.
Maybe we can learn a lesson here from what's going on in Russia.
This bill that just came out of the Senate is absolutely terrible.
And the Democrats rammed it through because they have no accomplishments so far this year and the midterms are approaching, so they've got to have something to hang their hats on.
And they had to twist Joe Manchin's arm and Kyrsten Sinema's arm.
And they tried to bring all the moderates in line, and it passes with a tie-breaking vote from the Vice President Kamala Harris.
But it was just terrible.
And the procedure they used is called Vote Arama.
Vote Arama is this procedure that allows senators to propose an unlimited number of amendments to budget-related measures.
And then they bring up the amendments, they can vote on them, they can shoot them down.
And this can go on for 12 hours, 14 hours, went on 16 hours to get this stupid Inflation Reduction Act through that's not going to reduce inflation whatsoever.
The only silver lining here is because the senators can propose all these sorts of amendments, they can really highlight the hypocrisy of the people who are in the majority who are cramming this through.
So some Republican senators did that.
Marco Rubio in particular.
Rubio's thinking, okay, we're going to get this dumb bill.
There's no way to stop that.
But at least we can get Democrats on the record for their insane priorities.
One of which is this.
Marco Rubio...
Proposes to limit federal pregnancy subsidies to women, to the only people who can actually get pregnant.
And you know it, all the Democrats shoot it down.
Well, thank you, Mr.
President.
A few minutes ago, I looked back.
Across 5,500 years of human history, so far, every single pregnancy has been a biological female.
And so therefore, the only thing I'm trying to do is make sure that federal law is clear, that since every pregnancy that's ever existed has been in a biological female, that our federal laws reflect that, and our pregnancy programs are available to the only people who are capable of getting pregnant.
Biological females.
Very simple.
I would accept a unanimous consent if they want to offer it, and we can move on and not waste any time.
Senator Murray has 10 seconds left.
When we're facing challenges in this country and helping our constituents to lower costs, it is outrageous that Republicans are trying to define pregnancy, of all things, on this floor, on this day, after hours of voting on amendments.
I urge a no vote.
It is outrageous that Republicans want to limit pregnancy funding to women.
Outrageous!
And what does Patty Murray say?
She doesn't want to go all the way.
And admit that the Democrats are now, it is the official line of the Democrats that men can become pregnant.
That men can be women and vice versa.
So she says, we don't have time for this.
You don't have time for this.
Lady, you've been voting for 16 hours.
Wasting everybody's time on this absolute nonsense.
Now you're telling me all of it.
We don't have any time to have a unanimous consent, up or down vote on whether women are really women.
Whether men can become pregnant or not.
We don't have time for this.
Of course we have time.
They just don't want to do it because the Libs now believe that men can become pregnant.
So this was a great bit from Rubio.
I think it's a great idea.
It was good as a political stunt and also it should be voted on and it should pass unanimously.
However, I have one little thing that bugs me about Rubio's stunt.
Can we please stop using the phrase biological females?
Can we please stop using the phrase?
She's a biological female.
He's a biological male.
Stop it.
Stop it.
That phrase grants the left's entire premise.
Because when you say, I limit it to biological females, you are implying that there is some other kind of female.
That you could maybe be a biological male, but a spiritual female, or a non-biological female, or a psychological female, or whatever.
Which is the Democrats' whole point.
The Democrats' whole point is that you can be a biological female, but...
In your gender expression, you can be a male or not a male or a female or something in between or whatever.
And the conservative's point is that sex and gender expression are and ought to be Extremely similar or the same.
Yes, you can be a girl and kind of a tomboy.
Yes, you can be a fella and a little bit light in the loafers.
But your sex and your gender are essentially the same thing and they ought to be the same thing.
That's our point.
So you don't need to use this phrase.
Biological female.
He's a biological male.
You just say man or woman.
That will suffice.
And actually, it's the only coherent way to make our argument.
This really bugs me because the manipulation of language is a little bit of a hobby horse of mine.
I wrote an entire book on it called Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which all you wonderful people out there made a number one national bestseller.
But this is the way that the Democrats control the political order.
They don't even necessarily do it through votes or through big campaigns.
Very often the way that they do it is just by subtly shifting all the language, and then they win the debate before it even takes place.
And that's what's happening with biological female.
So just cut it out.
It's a great idea.
I love the whole thing.
Rubio's so right to put forward an amendment to say we're going to limit funding to women.
But we've got to cut it out with the qualifiers.
The spiritual, psychological, non-biological.
Speaking of misusing words...
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, is, I think, the Democrat par excellence here in terms of the manipulation of language.
He's trying to redefine everything.
He's trying to redefine recession.
He's trying to redefine all sorts of issues.
Sometimes, though, this manipulation of language confuses the senile commander-in-chief to the point that he forgets that he's the President.
You know, I know most families are focused on just putting three meals on the Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's the president's job as well.
That's my job, and it's the president's job as well.
He's kind of proving his point here, by the way, that Joe Biden is, practically speaking, not really the president.
He's kind of proving that point because he clearly didn't write what's on the teleprompter.
He didn't even read it.
They just put stuff in front of him, and he tries to read it, usually unsuccessfully.
So yes, it's almost certainly the case that other people around Joe Biden are calling the shots because Biden doesn't know which end is up.
However, it is worth pointing out, a lot of conservatives will recoil at this idea that part of the president's job is just creating good communities and making sure that people are flourishing and having a good life.
A lot of the libertarians, especially, will recoil at that idea.
They did recoil at that when Donald Trump said the same thing in 2016.
He said, well, what I want to do is I want you to have good communities.
If I'm president, I'm going to give you good communities, I'm going to give you good life, and you're all going to flourish, and it's going to be great.
And the libertarians kind of recoiled at that.
They said, We're good to go.
He's right.
He's right in principle.
Trump was right when he said it.
Biden was right when he tried to say it.
The slip for Biden was, he said, and that's the president's job as well.
When he was supposed to say, and that's the president's job as well, right?
The emphasis was on the wrong place.
He was supposed to suggest that he is the president, not that someone else is the president.
But regardless, the point that the speechwriter wrote in there is true.
The president is the symbol of the government.
He is the head of state.
And the government, yes, protects all of our liberty, but the point is to ensure the blessings of liberty.
That's what you see in the Constitution.
And if you've got a crappy country where everyone's dying and killing each other and the country itself is falling apart, then all the pie-in-the-sky ideology, abstract ideas on a napkin in the world are not going to do anything.
That and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee until Joe Biden becomes president, in which case you need like $7.50 to get a cup of coffee because of rampant inflation.
When you want to protect yourself, not just your country, not just your community, but your data, you've got to check out ExpressVPN.
Right now, go to ExpressVPN.com slash Knowles.
What if there were someone out there who kept a log of every single thing you did every minute of the day?
That would probably be pretty creepy, right?
What if I told you that is exactly what happens every time you go online?
Your internet provider is allowed to store logs of every website you have ever visited and can legally sell these data to anyone.
That is why you've got to use ExpressVPN.
I love ExpressVPN.
I trust them on all my devices.
That is what I use to secure my internet connection through their secure platform.
Many VPNs claim to have a no-logs policy, but they've been caught logging customer activity.
ExpressVPN is the only VPN I trust because they use trusted server technology.
They were the first major VPN provider to engineer all of their VPN servers to run in RAM.
And you don't have to take my word or ExpressVPN's word for it.
They had one of the biggest assurance firms, PWC, PricewaterhouseCoopers, audit their technology.
It's no wonder that The Verge named ExpressVPN the number one VPN in the world.
Stop letting people keep logs of what you do online.
Go to expressvpn.com slash Knowles right now.
Find out how you can get three months for free.
expressvpn.com slash Knowles.
Expressvpn.com slash Knowles.
Head on over there right now to learn more.
learn more.
Speaking of our broader ruling class, speaking of the people who are really calling the shots, when Joe Biden says, you know, look, it's my job and it's the president's job too, you know, whatever these people are putting in front of me, telling me and leading me around like a marionette, when we're talking about the ruling class, not just in the government, but in the media, in big when we're talking about the ruling class, not just in the government, but in the media, in big tech, in the education system, in all over the place, in the financial system, in woke corporations, they tend to set
And sometimes the narrative changes.
You are seeing that happen right now.
This is a little reported on story, but it's pretty jarring.
The media are shifting the narrative on Ukraine.
When I'm referring to a jarring story, I'm not even talking about the Ukraine story.
I'm talking about the story of the media shifting their narrative on Ukraine.
What we have been told...
Up until this moment is that Ukraine is not just an Eastern European country that was invaded by Russia, but Ukraine is the symbol of the West.
We are Ukraine.
Slava Ukraini.
This is it.
This is the last stand for democracy.
We need to focus all of our efforts.
We need to put all of our resources into defending Ukraine.
Vladimir Zelensky, he is the greatest ruler in the history of the world.
This country is absolutely pristine.
Obviously, we've got to just totally focus on saving the country, okay?
Send them all the money.
Send them all the weapons.
Maybe send them some of our fighters, too.
Now, the same media were pushing that idea and changing all their little avatars on social media to include the Ukraine flag and running all these puff pieces on Ukraine.
Now they're changing the narrative.
This story just came out of CBS News that the vast majority of the funding and the weapons that were sending to Ukraine are disappearing.
We're seeing this incredible historic flow of weapons coming into Ukraine.
Do we have any sense as to where they're going?
We don't know.
There is really no information as to where they're going at all.
You know, all this stuff goes to the border and then kind of like something happens.
It kind of like 30 percent maybe reaches 65 destination.
30 percent.
Are you concerned about weapons getting in the wrong hands?
I don't care at all whether that happens.
What sort of a unit do you command?
Can't say.
OK.
The U.S. has sent tens of thousands of anti-aircraft and anti-armor systems, artillery rounds, hundreds of artillery systems, switchblade armored drones, and tens of millions of rounds of small worms ammunition.
But in a conflict where front lines are scattered and conditions change without warning, not all of those supplies reach their destination.
What?
Some of us have been saying this sort of thing for months.
The conservatives have been saying this sort of thing for months.
And the media, CBS News and all the rest of them, have accused us of being pro-Putin, pro-Russia, undermining democracy, authoritarian, all this kind of crap.
And now they're saying exactly the same thing.
For months, we've been saying, hey, are you sure we should be sending all these weapons over here?
Ukraine is actually kind of a corrupt country.
Actually, there's a little bit more going on right here than I think is being reported on in the press.
And they say, you're a Putin stooge!
If you don't want to send bazillions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine and escalate into a more and more direct war with Russia, a nuclear former superpower, well, you're just a stooge!
You're undemocratic!
You're anti-American or whatever!
And now, they're running the same sort of story.
We haven't talked about Ukraine in a little while because the war has become basically just a war of attrition.
They're just going to duke this out forever.
Even though in the first days of the war we were told by all the geniuses this is going to be over in three or four days.
It's held out.
It's a little bit of a stalemate.
The operation's ongoing.
The war has really been going on since long before the Russian invasion of this greater part of Ukraine.
It's been going on since at least 2014.
Really, this conflict has been going on much, much longer.
Not even just back to the early days of the Soviet Union.
This conflict's been going on.
It dates back a thousand years.
So my entire position on Ukraine from the very beginning has been...
It's complicated.
And I think that's the least popular position of all.
Because everyone wants you to be either, we need to all go fly over to Ukraine, send in the 101st Airborne, Vladimir Zelensky's Winston Churchill.
Or, you see some people who are reactionary, they say Russia is totally in the right.
Actually, if you really think about it, Vladimir Putin is a really strong, good guy or whatever.
And my opinion on the war is...
It's complicated.
It's complicated.
It is.
Why did this war break out?
Well, Vladimir Zelensky himself says it's because Joe Biden went weak on the Russian oil sanctions.
And I think he's quite right there.
Why else did the war break out?
Is it in part because the United States was obviously very involved in the Maidan revolution in 2014?
Yeah, I think that was probably part of it.
And you've seen people from the foreign apparatus of the United States who have essentially admitted that in recent weeks.
Is it because NATO expanded eastward?
Is it because after the fall of the Berlin Wall, you had people like George Kennan, Sam Nunn, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
These are tough cold warriors saying, hey guys, don't use this opportunity to expand NATO eastward.
That's going to unnecessarily antagonize Russia, and you're going to increase the likelihood of a real hot war.
And then what happened?
NATO expanded eastward, I think, recklessly.
Do you think that had something to do with the outbreak of tension there?
I think probably it did.
Do you think it had something to do with the idea that we formerly had buffer states between these larger powers, the West, the United States, and Europe, and Russia on the other side, and then the buffer states went away?
Now you've got greater powers up against one another, and that can create tension and the possibility of war.
Yeah, I think it all had to do with that.
Is Ukraine an extremely corrupt country?
Yes, it is.
So is it any surprise that the majority of money and ammunition and guns that we're sending over there is just disappearing, going to the black market somewhere?
It's not a surprise to me.
I guess it's a surprise to CBS News.
Maybe they should have tuned in to the Michael Knowles show, and they would have learned a thing or two.
Now they wouldn't be so shocked in their report.
Why are they airing this now?
If you go to Twitter, it's actually hard to find that clip now.
It took the clip down because it started making the rounds.
What is this about?
The war is not going as the geniuses in our foreign policy establishment thought it was going to go.
And so all of a sudden, after ginning up all of the Americans' eagerness and appetite for war for Ukraine and getting everyone to change their little profile avatars to the Ukraine flag and getting really, really excited about this, they realize, huh, maybe this isn't the wisest war to get too involved in.
Now we're going to kind of tamp that down and we're going to portray Ukraine as a little bit more corrupt than we previously had.
That's one possibility.
Or the other possibility is, The foreign policy establishment, which absolutely sees Ukraine and a lot of the rest of Eastern Europe as essential to the Western foreign policy and to containing Russia, they are realizing, huh, our strategy of just giving guns and everything to the Ukrainians isn't really working, so now we need a little bit more direct action.
So what they might be doing is saying, look, we still need to defend Ukraine.
We still have a great interest in this war, but it's not going to be enough to send them a bunch of missiles.
We have to send in our own guys.
We need to get more involved in the war.
The way that this plays out in the media over the coming weeks will determine which of those two possibilities it is.
But it's a major, major narrative shift, and it's a sudden narrative shift.
And it's not happening accidentally.
It's happening because of a change in strategic thinking with regard to the war in Ukraine.
Speaking of death, and speaking of other things that I'm obviously right about, you know I hate to say I told you so, but a lot of these things that we've been talking about on this show in particular have just been jumping to the forefront of the media and the news and I've said for a long time, abortion is not about...
Freedom.
Abortion is not about the right to choose, and you choose this, and I choose this, and we all just kumbaya, man.
I've said abortion is a religious sacrament, that all politics ultimately is religious.
If you think that your politics is not rooted in religion, you're probably...
You're probably really superstitious, actually.
You're probably involved in a caricature of religion.
Because necessarily when we're making moral decisions and ethical decisions, they come down to religion.
I said abortion is especially, especially vulnerable to that.
There's a video that's going around the internet of a young woman who is teaching other women how to, as they prepare for their abortion and after their abortion, build an actual altar at which to worship.
Building an altar for your abortion can be a really cathartic procedure, can be a really cathartic process, because it just creates a space for your sacred container where you can return to whenever you want to meditate, whenever you want to think deeply, or contemplate any aspect of your abortion.
It's a really beautiful way to just give reference to the experience and hold the experience in a really sacred way.
I also really like to add the abortion pills themselves to the altar to really bless the pills that we're going to be taking into our bodies during this process and place the container of which you plan to put the products of conception or the fetal remains within to catch that after you've passed it and save it for later when we find a way to To bury or otherwise,
to where we find a way to properly dispose of the fetal remains in a way that gives reverence and respect and support to this sacred abortion experience.
That's a whole lot of thought and prayer and liturgy and worship for a meaningless clump of cells, don't you think?
When you want to tune out of this insane, toxic social media big tech environment and still interact with people, but in a way that's much more conducive to human flourishing, you've got to check out Tuvu.
Right now, head on over to Tuvu.com slash Knowles.
It is time to take a stand and stop feeding the big tech beast that wants to cancel us and censor us and isolate us from one another on social media.
You have heard me talk a lot about Tuvu.
That is the new subscription-based alternative on social media that weeds out the bots and the trolls and the invasive ads and, most importantly, the algorithms that make big tech such a toxic place.
Tuvu is the photo-sharing community app built on family values, data privacy, and freedom of opinion.
It's time to move our communities, our families, and our churches to a better place online, where big tech is not pushing their agenda, their vice, their addictive content, and the damaging material that they have out there to all of our mental health.
TuVu is ad-free, so they answer to you, the subscriber.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
On TuVu, your data will never be sold to advertisers or data miners.
Instead, TuVu sells social media freedom to those who use it for just $2.99 a month or $22.99 per year.
That right there weeds out fakes all along the way.
Are you hesitant to try a new platform?
Well, for the next seven days only, TuVu is giving our listeners a free annual membership.
When you go to TuVu.com slash Knowles, you'll get a free annual membership.
Get all the details in your free annual subscription for a limited time only at TuVu.com slash Knowles.
Head on over there right now.
Do not miss this opportunity.
TuVu.com slash Knowles or look for the TuVu app on Google Play or the App Store.
Now, this is the moment in the show where, in years past, I would have read you an ad for Harry's Razors.
And I would have said, hey, you millions of listeners out there, I love Harry's, and you should go out and buy Harry's.
But I'm not going to do that, because I don't love Harry's.
I hate Harry's.
If you don't know the story, Harry's used to advertise on our shows until it was me.
It was little old me.
I went along on a different show years prior and I agreed with the host's statement that boys are boys and girls are girls.
And this was too much for Harry's.
Aries then pulled their ads because of, quote, values misalignment.
Well, we're not going to promote products that hate your values.
So we did the only thing that makes sense.
We launched our own razor company, Jeremy's Razors.
Every Jeremy's Razors kit comes with a premium razor, two sets of blades, shaving cream, and aftershave balm.
It's a beautiful thing to behold.
Over 70,000 kits have already shipped.
Do not go to harrys.com.
Go to ihateharrys.com.
Get your Jeremy's Razors Founders kit.
It's time to stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate your guts.
Give it to Jeremy instead.
This video of this young woman who is dressed just like the archetypal millennial woman.
She's wearing yoga pants.
She's in her studio apartment in probably New York or something.
And she builds an altar.
She says, on the altar for our abortion, we're going to put the abortion drug.
And then, how spooky is this?
She says, we're going to get a jar that we're going to put the product of conception into.
And then she clarifies what she means by that euphemism.
She says, you know, the fetal remains.
So she's saying, you know, put the dead baby into this little jar on the altar with some incense, with the abortion drugs, and you're going to worship at this sacred altar.
People are looking at this and they're saying, oh my gosh, this is the craziest thing ever.
Oh, can you believe this?
Yes, I can believe this, because it's not the craziest thing ever.
This is the norm in human history.
It is a human sacrifice, an actual, visible, undeniable human sacrifice, and that is the norm.
Not killing babies is the exception in human history.
In Christian civilization, we say no human sacrifice, no killing our babies.
We try to tamp down eugenics, which also plays a huge role in abortion and also has been practiced all around the world since the dawn of time.
And the Christian civilization says, no, we're not going to have any of that.
As Christianity declines in public...
You're not going to have nothing.
You're not going to have a vacuum.
You're not going to have neutrality.
You're going to have all the same insane paganism that typifies the rest of the world throughout all of history.
That's going to come flooding back in, as it is with vengeance.
This is the normal state of things.
If you don't like that normal state of things with the human sacrifice and the bacchanals and the orgies and the demon worship and all that kind of stuff, if you don't like that, then it is incumbent upon us to re-Christianize our political order.
You hear the libs crying about Christian nationalism, the rise of Christian nationalism as though this is the worst thing in the world.
Christian nationalism is just the opposite of atheist globalism.
That's the monkeypox orgies taking place with government sanction.
That's what that looks like.
If you don't want that society, your alternative right now, Is Christian nationalism.
And we have not only the right, but the duty to reimpose a normal, broadly Christian society in our culture.
Okay?
We have the right to do that.
Now, what some people will say is, well, you know, look, abortions are going to happen.
Abortions are going to happen, and so either they can be safe or dangerous.
First of all, no abortion is safe because it always kills a baby.
But second of all, even the premise is kind of flawed.
Sure, yes, there will be some abortions that take place, even if you outlaw abortion, and even if you stigmatize it in society.
But many fewer will take place.
When we had laws against abortion, many, many, many fewer abortions took place.
If that argument from the libs is true, look, abortions are going to happen anyway.
They might as well be legal.
Well, look, people are going to use drugs anyway.
It might as well be legal.
Well, it's the kind of liberal slash libertarian argument.
If that were true, then that would be an argument for getting rid of all the laws.
Well, look, murders are going to take place.
We should just make sure that murders don't go underground.
We just need it to be legal and regulated.
Look, tax evasion is going to occur, but we should have it be legal.
We should get rid of all of the laws and then just have total anarchy.
That's the conclusion of that.
But no, of course that's not the case.
When you have laws against stuff, you get less of that stuff.
Abortion obviously should be illegal.
It should be stigmatized in society.
And that witch, that sorceress who was showing you how to build an altar to the human sacrifice of your dead baby, that woman should be totally ostracized from society and should be so ashamed that she doesn't show her face in public.
That's what should happen.
And we should do that from the cultural front, but also from the political front.
Because politics is downstream of culture, but culture is also downstream of politics.
They kind of work in tandem.
It's actually very difficult to differentiate between the two.
Speaking of love and hate, there's a story that you'll have to indulge me.
I am so unreasonably obsessed with this story, and I'm so elated by the turn of events in this story.
According to page six, Kim Kardashian and Skeet Davidson are breaking up.
They are.
This whirlwind romance went on for about nine months.
I think Mr.
Davidson appeared on some episodes of the Kardashian TV show.
I've never watched an episode of the Kardashian TV show, but he was on it Skeet Davidson, who came out and was one of the people breaking up the marriage between Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, a marriage where they had multiple kids and Skeet comes in and he just is a homewrecker and what happens?
Now they've broken up and I'm really happy.
I'm really happy.
Skeet Davidson actually got Kim's initials and the initials of her children with Kanye West tattooed on his neck.
That's going to be very awkward.
It's going to be a big payday for Skeet Davidson's tattoo removal artist.
A few lessons here.
One lesson is don't get the names of your thrice-married girlfriend's kids tattooed on your neck.
That would be lesson one.
But the second lesson here, it's the real reason that I'm obsessed with this story.
It's because I hate attacks on marriage.
And yes, Kim Kardashian has been married multiple times and I don't really know if those marriages were valid or not valid.
But here's what I do know.
I know that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West Had multiple kids together.
They were working it out.
Even in Hollywood, even with both of their eccentric, wild personalities.
And I was actually depressed when they split up.
Because I hate attacks on marriage.
I hate undermining marriage.
Not just at a personal level, though I am personally disgusted by attacks on marriage.
Whether that be trying to redefine marriage, whether that be trying to weaken marriage through no-fault divorce, any of the attacks on marriage.
But I am really opposed to attacks on marriage from a political level as well.
Because marriage is the fundamental political unit.
So regardless of even our own personal reactions to that, or our own emotional investment in marriage, just from the level of sheer political order and political philosophy, if you weaken marriage, your society is going to suck.
Because the libs want to convince us that the individual, the atomized individual, is the basic unit of society.
And they want to break down all of the institutions and all of the ties and all of the families in particular that bind us all together.
They want to break us down into the individual because then we're much easier to dominate and control.
Once we're all broken down into the little individuals, they can gather us up like a bundle of sticks and do what they want with us.
That's what the libs believe.
The libertarians also believe that the individual is the basic unit of society.
They don't want to gather us all together in a bundle of sticks like the commies do, but they do hold the same basic view of political society.
The conservatives have a different view.
The conservatives believe, no, the individual is not the basic unit of politics.
Actually, politics means public.
It's the stuff we do together.
It's how we live together in our cities and our states and our countries.
And so necessarily involves multiple people.
You see echoes of this when Christ describes his church.
He says, where two or more of you are gathered, there I am also.
His description of the church as something that is public with multiple people held in common or participated in in common in the body of Christ.
You see that in religion and you certainly see it in political society, regardless of what religion is considered the animating spirit of the society, just in politics when we're all together, that involves multiple people.
And the family is the basic unit of that.
And Skeet freaking Davidson tried to bust up a family and I'm glad that it failed for him.
I'm glad we should be very pro-Kanye, who was trying to keep his marriage together.
Kanye, flawed though he may be, flawed though we all are, he was trying to keep his marriage together.
Kim Kardashian embracing just total selfishness.
She did a whole magazine spread about how, in my 40s, I'm just going to do me.
I'm just going to do whatever I want to do.
That's what a mother of multiple children should do, right?
Just whatever she wants to do.
Is that it?
No.
That's a recipe for a bad society.
And you can tell the rotten fruit of this This tree of ideology by the fact that she dated Skeet Davidson, who's totally gross, and now they broke up, and that's great.
I'm really happy about that.
Speaking of family...
Dick Cheney, former vice president, is coming out in defense of his daughter.
His daughter is getting absolutely trounced in her congressional bid in Wyoming because she was a Republican, and then she, practically speaking, switched sides, and now she only ever helps the Democrats.
And she's the face of the ridiculous Democrat January 6th charade.
And on the crucial votes, she always sides with the big libs.
So in a last-ditch effort to save her campaign, Dick Cheney is coming out to defend her.
In our nation's 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.
He tried to steal the last election, using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.
He is a coward.
A real man wouldn't lie to his supporters.
He lost his election, and he lost big.
I know it, he knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know it.
Lynn and I are so proud of Liz for standing up for the truth, doing what's right, honoring her oath to the Constitution, when so many in our party are too scared to do so.
Liz is fearless.
She never backs down from the fight.
There is nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.
And she will succeed.
I am Dick Cheney.
I proudly voted for my daughter.
I hope you will too.
I'm Liz Cheney, and I approve this message.
Okay, Dick Cheney wants to defend his daughter.
He's a good dad.
Okay.
Okay, fine.
I'm not going to criticize him for defending his daughter.
It's good to defend your daughter.
Good to defend your family.
But come on, man.
The claims that this guy's making.
In our nation's entire history, Donald Trump is the most dangerous figure ever in American history.
The most dangerous ever?
How about Aaron Burr?
You know Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president who killed the former treasury secretary and founding father, Alexander Hamilton, while he was vice president?
Oh, and then led an insurrection and tried to take over the entire country.
That guy wasn't a little bit more dangerous, maybe, than Donald Trump, who committed the great, evil, awful crime of...
Lowering taxes a little and getting some conservative justices on the Supreme Court.
Well, that's the other thing.
That's the other thing.
For all the attacks on Donald Trump that we're hearing, the man was the most conservative and the most effective president of my entire lifetime.
Roe v.
Wade is no longer the law of the land because of Donald Trump.
Had Hillary Clinton become president, had the Democrats gotten their way in 2016, or had the squish Republicans gotten their way in 2016, Donald Trump would not have been president.
You would not have had Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett on the court.
Roe v.
Wade would have been upheld.
You would still have 850,000 babies a year being killed for abortion.
That's just one issue.
For that alone, Donald Trump is one of the greatest presidents in American history.
I don't remember the Bush administration that Dick Cheney helped to lead.
I don't remember the Bush administration overthrowing Roe v.
Wade.
In fact, I remember the Bush administration giving us John Roberts.
Now, it did give us Sam Alito.
That's great.
But the Bush administration kind of had to be strong-armed into giving us decent judges.
They were trying to nominate Harriet Myers and all that.
Just a bunch of really...
I just...
I'm happy that Dick Cheney is defending his daughter.
That's good for him.
But I do not want to be preached to by the Bush administration on what it means to be a true conservative, okay?
Especially if he's lambasting Trump supporters as somehow not having principles or not being sufficiently conservative.
The Trump administration was much, much better than the Bush administration by pretty much any measure.
By pretty much any measure whatsoever.
Speaking of overruling Roe v.
Wade...
This is great news out of Indiana.
Following the overruling of Roe, following the Dobbs decision, Indiana lawmakers passed legislation to ban all abortions, except in the cases of rape or incest, which is really the same thing, right?
There's not a whole lot of consensual incest that's going on.
So, except in the cases of rape or medical emergency...
All the other abortions have been banned, which means that 99% plus of abortions are banned in Indiana.
This is the first ban on abortion since Roe v.
Wade was overturned.
The White House says the Indiana legislature took a devastating step as a result of the Supreme Court's extreme decision to overrule Roe v.
Wade and eliminate women's constitutionally protected right to abortion.
So blah, blah, blah.
We don't like this.
Indiana is the first step.
We need all the other states to do this too.
Let's go, baby.
We talked a lot, especially during the Tea Party era, about how politics is downstream of culture.
We are now in the culture is downstream of politics era.
We are seeing the political effects, the law as a teacher, changing and shaping culture.
The minute Dobbs came down, you saw these news reports interviewing young women and young men who said with dismay, gosh, I might not have so much promiscuous sex anymore.
I've really got to think about this.
I've got to not just go out and have a bunch of different sexual partners every night because I might not have the easy out of abortion to be able to kill my kid if a baby is produced.
So, hmm, maybe I'll return to a more traditional kind of behavior that's more conducive to my own flourishing and the flourishing of society.
You're damn right.
That sounds great.
That sounds like culture's downstream of politics.
Indiana's leading the way.
Let's see it from lots of other states as well.
Speaking of family values, another great story.
The hits just keep on coming.
Amid...
The ongoing lawsuits that are being leveled against Pornhub.
This is, I think, the biggest porn website.
Certainly one of the biggest names in porn.
It's owned by a company called MindGeek.
And I guess they own lots of other properties and websites too.
There are lawsuits now because these porn sites host child pornography and rape content and all sorts of illegal content.
And in part, this is because the limits on who can upload what and how the videos stay up and how the videos are taken down, they're not really well defined.
It's not as though for every video that's uploaded to one of these websites, they're checking people's ID cards, making sure people are over 18, making sure that the women who are in these videos weren't drugged or coerced or anything like that.
So there's all sorts of outright illegal material on these websites.
Furthermore, All of the material is by definition obscene.
We have laws against obscenity in this country.
We had laws passed in the late 1990s.
Bipartisan support passed to limit porn on the internet, and unfortunately a bunch of groomer creepy judges shot that down baselessly.
So, if you wanted, if there were the political will, you could take down these behemoths right now.
Well...
The market might be taking down the porn websites before even the political order will.
Visa...
Is now suspending ad payments on Pornhub and other MindGeek websites.
MasterCard had already suspended use on Pornhub, and now they're suspending use of its card for advertising payments on other websites owned by MindGeek.
The lawsuit in particular right now that is doing this is a woman who said that her boyfriend uploaded a video of her from when she was 13 years old.
13.
13.
It's not like we're talking at 17 and a half here.
Clearly, this girl must have been very, very underage, and yet it was proliferating all around these platforms.
And so it's a really clear-cut case.
Visa, MasterCard, they're not doing this.
As far as I'm concerned, we should take down the big porn giants by any means necessary.
The political order, lawsuits, obviously there's some politics involved here.
Then there's market forces involved because the companies don't want to catch the flack and they're getting activists calling them and saying, you're facilitating child pornography, you're facilitating rape, so they don't want it all.
I don't care.
Whatever it is.
There is no right to porn.
There is no right to make money on the sexual exploitation of women, and in some cases children.
Take it down.
By the way, not only because some of this content is very, very clearly illegal.
Even if the content weren't illegal, we should still fight against porn.
Why?
One, because it's wrong.
But two, I don't want to just sound like the church lady here.
Two, because it is harming a huge number of people in this country.
Every single week in my mailbag, I get so many questions from young men who are talking about how porn has ruined their lives.
We read a study on the show.
This was a long time ago.
There's a study that the average age that a young boy is exposed to hardcore porn on the internet is like 11, I think.
The vast majority of men have looked at porn at some point in their lives, and a growing number of women have looked at it and struggled with the temptation to look at it as well.
And it's really messing them up.
You're seeing huge numbers of men who are experiencing erectile dysfunction because they've gotten their brains so turned to scrambled eggs on porn.
I could go on and I've actually stopped even reading all of these questions in the mailbag because they're so repetitive because so many people are writing in with the exact same problems.
Porn is a really good issue here because I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say high-speed internet porn is one of the biggest political problems in America.
Why?
Because it's in part a technological problem.
20 years ago, this did not exist.
20 years ago, I guess maybe you'd say 30 years ago at this point, if you wanted to go look at porn, you'd have to go to the seedy part of town and go into some scuzzy-looking shop, and there would be enough shame involved in all of that that you just wouldn't do it.
Or you'd have to go to the magazine store and go to the rack in the back at the top and buy a Playboy or a Penthouse magazine or whatever.
Now, we all have portals to hell in our pockets, or on our laptops, or on our iPads, or wherever.
And the sort of porn that is available is way more intense than your uncle's playboy from the 70s.
Way, way more intense.
And there are a ton of psychological studies on this.
It just really messes people up.
And if you just look at the statistics on it, if you've got a country where the vast majority of people are in a state of perpetual grave mortal sin that they can't escape from, that they want to escape from, but they're too addicted to, You are not going to have a flourishing political order.
You just can't.
A good comparison would be to drugs.
If you had a country where 90% of men and some other large number of women were all hooked on heroin all the time, you would not have a good political order.
And so I'm all for this.
Wield government power to stop this stuff.
I would say the same thing for drugs.
We didn't get to the Brittany Griner story right now.
We'll get to Brittany Griner maybe tomorrow or later on this week.
But so many people are complaining about Brittany Griner because she's being sentenced to jail for using drugs.
They're saying, oh, she shouldn't be sentenced for that long or it shouldn't be nine years.
The sentence in Russia is not unusual.
It's not like she's just being selectively prosecuted because she's an American and it gives them leverage.
This just is the punishment for drugs in Russia.
We used to have much tougher punishment for drugs in America.
We used to have much tougher punishment for porn and obscenity in America.
We used to have much tougher punishments in years past.
And maybe right now, you're trying to grapple with this idea.
You're saying, look, I don't think we should have tough drug laws.
I don't think we should have tough laws on obscenity or sex or whatever, weird kind of vice stuff.
I don't think we should have any of that.
But then ask yourself this question.
Do you think America today...
Is a better country than it was 20, 30 years ago?
Do you really think that?
You really think 2022 alters to your abortion, transing the little kids?
Everyone, especially on the porn issue, totally messed up on this weird sex stuff.
Highest rates of drug overdoses ever.
Average life expectancy declining in the United States, driven in large part by drug overdoses.
You're really going to tell me?
I don't think so, Buster.
I think we've got to do that.
I think we've got to start wielding politics.
Not to create some utopian society, but just to go back to the much more sane society that we had not that long ago.
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.
