Ep. 1080 - We Are All An "Extreme Threat to Democracy"
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Biden calls half the country an “extreme threat to democracy,” another Trump prediction gets proven true, and Winnie the Pooh becomes a serial killer.
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On the heels of calling roughly half the country semi-fascist, the Biden administration is now somehow upping the rhetoric, referring to us all as a, quote, The President thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy.
The President has been clear as he can be on that particular piece when we talk about a democracy, when we talk about our freedoms.
The way that he sees is the MAGA Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party.
This is an extreme threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights.
Notice, that line was not off the cuff.
That was not merely some gaffe from Corrine Jean-Pierre or Joe Biden.
She was reading off of her written notes.
She repeated the phrase.
The White House made a conscious decision to refer to MAGA Republicans the same way that they would refer to ISIS. Actually, probably more harshly than they would refer to ISIS. The Libs call the leader of ISIS an austere religious scholar.
The Libs hand Afghanistan over to the Taliban.
They're actually pretty nice to the terrorists and to ISIS and Al-Qaeda and all those people.
They reserve the terrorist rhetoric for you, for parents, and for conservatives, and for MAGA Republicans, which, by the way, just means Republicans.
That's it.
That's all there is.
The Never Trump movement at this point is pretty much just Bill Kristol and five or six people that he has over to complain about Donald Trump over tea.
Statistically, for all intents and purposes, MAGA Republicans just means Republicans.
Which means the President of the United States, the same President who keeps threatening to strafe us all with squadrons of F-15s, is saying that half of the country should be treated as terrorists.
He's saying that the only way we can have government of the people, by the people, and for the people, is if we get rid of half the people.
A bad idea in general, an especially bad idea when those half of the people...
Or you.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Toby, who says...
I didn't want to believe that Michael actually loves pumpkin spice lattes.
But when he started calling them PSLs so casually, I knew he was being honest.
Now I need to find a way to reconcile this with the cigar-smoking, only Y-chromosome image of Michael that I had before.
I'll reconcile it for you.
I know that this can be shocking.
This was explained to me a little bit when I was in college by a pal of mine who was a few years older who was very, very preppy.
And I said, you know, he'd wear pink polo shirts all the time.
And I said, hey man, I won't use his name, but I said, hey man, isn't it a little girly to wear pink polo shirts?
And isn't it a little foppish and effeminate?
And he told me, he said, Michael, you don't understand.
It's actually the manliest thing of all to wear a pink polo shirt.
Because, you see, The pink polo shirt, it is just a facade.
It is in a way a kind of like a girdle or a corset to constrain the virile manliness within, just aching to get out.
That's what the pumpkin spice latte is, okay?
It is just a veneer of civilization.
Okay, of a sort of nice, light, okay, but beneath the surface, just underneath that frothy little foam and tasty little pumpkin spice sauce on top.
Oh, it's just pure masculinity.
Toxic.
Waiting to explode!
That's what's going on with my PSLs.
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Speaking of the MAGA Republicans, we need to add another coin to the Donald Trump was right jar.
I always try to keep the receipts here, because here's what happens in politics.
A conservative says something.
The liberals say, that's crazy, that's stupid, you're an idiot, you don't know anything, that's wrong, that's dangerous, it's a horrible idea.
And then...
I don't know, call it six months later, sometimes even a couple of years later, the conservative has proven completely correct and we say, hey, we were right the whole time.
And then what do the libs say?
No, never mind.
What are you talking about?
Who remembers that?
No, forget about it.
Move along, move along.
And rinse and repeat.
That goes on and on and on.
Then the conservatives will observe something and they'll say, wait, hold on.
No, this is what I think.
And the libs say, no, you're completely wrong.
It's stupid.
They'll laugh at us.
They'll ridicule us.
Well, this is what's happening right now when it comes to energy.
You might recall We're good to go.
And at the time, all the libs, and Germany in particular, mocked Donald Trump for this observation.
This was considered so risible that the American left-wing news outlets put out joke compilations of Trump making this claim.
This is a clip from NowThis, which is a left-wing news source and commentary source, mocking, from the time, mocking Trump's suggestion.
Germany's reaction to Trump's inaccurate claim is priceless.
...will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.
Oh, they're laughing.
Look at that.
Look at those Germans.
They're laughing.
Oh, there's that idiot Trump.
Trump's claim is not accurate and highly misleading, CNBC says.
Germany imports only a fraction of its total energy from Russia.
...in the Western Hemisphere...
We are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.
Now this!
There it is.
Okay, so how's that shaping up?
Well, Russia just announced that it's going to cut off Germany's gas supply via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for three days.
Just three days.
Okay, well that shouldn't matter at all, right?
Nothing's going to happen.
Because Trump's a big, dumb, stupid idiot, right?
And he said that Germany is too reliant on Russian energy and all the Germans laughed.
Okay.
Okay, so who cares?
They're going to shut off this one pipeline for three days.
No big deal, right?
Well, here's what the German economy minister, Robert Habeck, told the Financial Times.
Apparently, this move by Russia to shut off the gas for just three days has already forced German companies to stop production.
It's a development that he said is alarming.
He said, quote, One that is happening under enormous pressure.
Oh.
Not laughing now, I guess.
The Germans have said, what can we do with the three-day pause?
They said, I assume that we will be able to cope with it.
That was Klaus Mueller, the president of Germany's network regulator.
That's what he told Reuters.
I trust that Russia will return to 20% on Saturday, but no one can really say, oh, so it sounds like Trump was 100% correct.
And all the Germans were laughing and all the news outlets called Trump a big, stupid, dumb idiot.
And all the conservatives who followed Trump were just stupid, idiot rubes who don't know anything about energy.
Except we were all completely right.
And all of the geniuses at MSNBC and the financial analysts and the establishment and the think tanks, they were all completely wrong.
That's what happened.
And it's very important to point this out because it keeps happening.
That's why I keep focusing on this when it comes to COVID. We were right about the masks.
All of the genius authorities and experts and Fauci and all the big tech censors and all of the petty government officials from the local level to the international level, they were wrong.
We were right about the masks.
All of them were wrong about the masks.
Except for Fauci briefly when he was being honest about the masks, but then he reversed his position.
How about the vaccines?
When we said, I don't think the vaccines are actually going to stop you from catching COVID or spreading it.
And then Everyone, all the experts, all the authorities said the opposite.
And they all called us a bunch of big, dumb, stupid idiots and science deniers and all the rest.
We were 100% right.
They were 100% wrong.
Catching COVID, transmitting COVID, the risks of the vaccines.
Initially, we were told there are no risks to the vaccines.
We said, I think there actually are probably some pretty serious risks.
We were 100% right.
They were 100% wrong.
And it wasn't just COVID that this is the case on.
It's everything.
Right?
It's everything from the COVID masks to the Russian and German energy sectors.
Our experts are established geniuses who have the power to form public opinion and exclude certain opinions.
They don't know anything.
Okay?
And Joe Schmo on the street and Joe Schmo's representative named Donald Trump are much, much more correct.
They have a much, much better record than these people do.
Speaking of extreme threats...
There is a trailer out for a movie that, in spite of myself, I cannot wait to see.
But it's very, very disturbing.
The movie is called Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey.
You know, you're the first person I ever shown this place to.
Why am I so special?
Because soon, it will be Christopher and Mary Lovett.
We should be close now.
Christopher Robin from Winnie the Pooh is all grown up.
They go back to the Hundred Acre Wood.
We were friends for many years, and they're out there.
The beloved childhood characters...
Christopher, we need to leave.
Now!
I really need to find out what's happening here, okay?
have been abandoned by Christopher Robin.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
And have turned wild, and then there's demented Winnie the Pooh who starts stabbing people.
Oh my gosh.
We used to be friends.
Why are you doing this, please?
Okay, it goes on.
I think there was Piglet there, like attacking people.
This seems really, really stupid and funny, and I'll probably go see it.
Part of the reason this movie can be made is the copyright has run out on Winnie the Pooh, so now people can use the intellectual property.
But there is something...
It's disturbing here, and it's not just the fact that you've got these demented characters slashing people.
There have been teen slashers for a long time in movies.
What makes this especially disturbing is it's a beloved childhood character.
A character that made you feel really safe and nice and warm is now coming back and killing you.
Why?
Because Christopher Robin abandoned him, right?
Abandoned him, and now the animals have turned demented.
What the movie I think is really about, certainly from the trailer what it seems, is it's a movie about a permanent loss of innocence.
What the movie is really about, I don't think I'm reading too deeply into a teen slasher.
What it's really about, the crux of the whole movie, why they make it all about Winnie the Pooh, is it's because it is about people who have lost their childhood and their childhood innocence, who don't know how to get it back anymore in society.
And that actually is a cultural shift.
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I am going to go see Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey, but...
I want to see it as much because it looks like a kind of fun, silly slasher movie.
As for what it means culturally, I get letters to the mailbag all the time.
And I got one last week and it really stuck with me.
The question was, Michael, I got really into porn and all sorts of...
A lot of questions are about porn, but it could be about anything that causes you to lose your innocence.
And he says, I really miss my innocence.
But I don't know that I can get my innocence back.
And I think that's what this movie is about.
Part of growing up is losing a little bit of your innocence.
Now, we hope that we don't just constantly degrade ourselves.
We hope that we don't remain mired in all the problems that come along with youth and all of the temptations.
But how do you recover some of that?
Well, you've got to get back on the right road again.
And that doesn't mean just remain in perpetual adolescence.
I think that's something that millennials and Gen Z, but millennials in particular, have really fallen into.
Millennials don't want to grow up.
Millennials, every time they pay a bill, they post it on Instagram and they say, wow, I'm totally adulting.
Wow, isn't this shocking?
No, it shouldn't be shocking that someone in their 30s is doing things that adults do.
But millennials don't want to grow up.
They don't want to get married.
They don't want to have kids.
They don't want to get off their parents' cell phone plan.
These are people who are in their 30s and early 40s in some cases, but they don't want to do it.
They're stuck in perpetual adolescence.
They want to go back to Disneyland alone.
They don't even have kids yet.
They'll just go to Disney World.
They'll go watch the latest superhero movie.
I don't mean to knock people for having a little bit of nostalgia for their childhood, but you're supposed to do those things While growing up and with your kids, that's how you get to relive your childhood when you're an adult.
You get to do it through and with your own children.
Actually, Kenny Loggins wrote a whole song about this, specifically about Winnie the Pooh.
It's called Back to Pooh Corner.
And the whole thing is, he wrote it when he was a high school junior or senior, and the whole thing was, well, I've wandered away.
I can't get back to the hundred acre wood.
Come on, I've got to get back to Winnie the Pooh and all my friends, so help me if you can.
I've got to get back to the We're good to go.
And he says, you know, I'm paraphrasing the lyrics, but he says, I was looking at my little kid lying in his crib, and I realized now I've returned to the Hundred Acre Wood and Pooh Corner and Winnie the Pooh.
And I've returned as the dad now.
And my little kid is there hugging my little Winnie the Pooh doll.
And so I do get to, you know, return in some ways to the joys of childhood, but it's in a new way.
It's in a mature way and an elevated way.
And our culture has kind of stopped that.
We've kind of stopped having kids.
We've kind of stopped growing up.
We've got to stop doing the things that adults are supposed to do.
I promise you that will be the most detailed analysis of Winnie the Pooh blood and honey trailer that you will see anywhere.
But I do think that's what's undergirding the movie.
I'll see it anyway.
But I'll see it in the same way that I look at a car accident around our culture and say, gosh, we've gotten really, really decadent and weird, haven't we?
Speaking of child abuse...
Doctors now, lib doctors and teachers, are getting really brazen about admitting that they are not only violating social norms but violating the law in some cases.
There's a doctor right now in San Francisco, Dr.
Scott Moser, who is admitting that he not only transes the kids, but he transes little kids.
He transes kids without any minimum age to perform these kind of surgeries at all.
The GCC, Gender Confirmation Center in San Francisco, we kind of have these secret missions.
Now that it's on a slide, these public secret missions, which are...
One of them is that we try to live with our values 30 to 40 years in the future.
And that puts us in a mindset of extreme affirmation, because affirmation at that time is a foregone conclusion.
This is a time in the future when...
Gender is just a thing.
Nobody makes a big deal out of it.
People are being screened as children and adolescents for their gender journey and appropriate steps are taken to get them involved in a multidisciplinary process to get them where they need to go.
That's the future.
I do not have a minimum age of any sort in my practice.
There's no chronological age that says you don't get surgery.
Now, having said that, I don't think I've ever done a consult on a 12-year-old yet, but we would if one came our way.
We just haven't had reason to.
And then we've done a number of 13-year-olds who we did consults on.
I think I've done one or two 13-year-old surgeries.
I think I've done one or two 13-year-old surgeries.
He's lopped off the genitals of 13-year-olds.
As I say, every time one of these stories comes out, We are accelerating down the slippery slope.
It's not that we've reached the bottom.
It's not that we're going to keep going afterward.
We're accelerating how fast we're going down the slippery slope.
Ten years ago, the idea that there would be more than a handful of adults who had these mutilations would be a scandal and unthinkable.
The idea that someone who was 18 years old or younger would have this done, truly, truly beyond the realm of the imagination.
Then, the idea, even a couple of years ago, that this would happen to 16-year-olds, unthinkable.
Yesterday, the idea that this would happen to 13-year-olds or 12-year-olds, he said, I'd do it to a 12-year-old.
I haven't yet, but I would.
Would be unthinkable.
What's it going to be tomorrow?
Tomorrow's going to be 9.
The day after that, it's going to be 8, 6, 7.
He says no limit.
And of course, the logic...
Or the kind of logic, the kind of illogic, but it follows from the premises, is on his side.
And conservatives need to wise up on this.
The minute that we grant the premise that a man who thinks he's a woman, maybe we should call him a she.
The minute that we grant in any way the premise that the man who thinks he's a woman should maybe be able to use the girl's bathroom.
The minute we grant the premise that an adult should have the right to lop off his own genitals and pretend to be a woman.
An adult, 35 years old.
I mean, these days that's not an adult because they don't know how to do adulting because millennials don't want to grow up.
But let's say someone chronologically an adult.
The minute we grant the premise that anyone at any age should be able to lop off his genitals because he's really seriously a man in a woman's body or he's got this permanent psychological condition where he's a man in a woman's body and so we have to let him lop his genitals off.
The minute we grant that, we've given the libs the whole game.
Because if that's really true, then certainly it's much better for people who have this totally real illness, you know, where you're a man in a woman's body or whatever.
We have to let them do it before puberty.
Because puberty is only going to set in the dysphoria, and then they're going to be really, really sad and depressed and have all these problems.
So we have to do it.
In fact, we should encourage people to have it done before they're 13.
Probably before they're nine.
People are starting puberty earlier and earlier because of all the weird chemicals we're pumping into the food.
So, okay, let's do it at nine now.
You have to grant that premise, I think.
Or you have to go to that extreme if you grant the premise of the libs.
That's why we're going there.
And conservatives, and especially the libertarians, are always trying to split the baby on this.
Well, no, okay, it's insane if you're under 18, but it's totally fine if you're over 18.
We have to, no.
No, it's just, we've got, if we're going to have a society, we have to agree on some basic principles of reality.
Can men become women or not?
They can.
Okay, so then no one should be able to do that.
Especially the kids, but really no one.
Speaking of abuse, Kristi Noem, who is the Republican governor of South Dakota, she just went on Fox and Friends and Talk about trying to split the baby.
To discuss the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago, which now it's so preposterous.
The FBI has posted on social media a photograph of the alleged top-secret documents that Trump had.
The classified documents that he totally wasn't allowed to have, I guess, maybe, sort of.
And they're so super-duper top-secret that they had to raid his home.
In, you know, without any warning whatsoever, as he's preparing to run for president in 2024, so super-duper top secret that we're going to post a picture of them on social media.
So, Kristi Noem, Republican governor, goes on Fox and Friends.
And I got to tell you, this whole interview, I felt like I was in Bizarro World.
This was not an interview on MSNBC. It was not an interview on CNN. It was an interview on Fox News.
It's supposed to be the right-wing channel.
About how terrible it was that Trump had the documents.
He had apparently three classified documents in his desk.
And then the stuff, as Brian detailed on the floor, it shows five yellow folders marked top secret.
And another one that says secret SCI, which means sensitive compartmentalized information.
Those are the biggest secrets in the world.
Why would he, and apparently the president, former president, went through him in January.
Why wouldn't he say, oh, you know what?
I really need to turn that back over.
Why'd he have all that stuff at Mar-a-Lago?
Well, that's why I think it's important that this is transparent and that we do have someone who's outside of the DOJ looking at this and talking to people.
What is this information?
We don't know what was in there.
We don't know.
I believe President Trump declassified all this information.
Let's find out really what the process is, what is right, what's precedent that other presidents have followed and make sure that this is done correctly.
Governor, I don't think any president has ever carted off that many documents to their house after they left the presidency.
I guess what this comes from is just we disagree on the premise here.
Because you've got Steve Doocy's really hammering this home.
He had classified documents.
You're not allowed to have classified documents.
And Kristi Noem, she seems kind of surprised by the commentary too.
It's like, well, you know, this will play out, whatever.
They weren't classified.
The documents were not classified.
Do you know how I know with 100% certainty that the documents were not classified?
Because Trump said so.
And that's actually all it takes.
That's all it takes is for the president to say the documents were not classified.
That declassifies them.
Because he's saying, I declassified them in the past.
Now you might respond and say, well, who knows if Trump actually declassified them in the past?
The answer to that?
Only Donald Trump can know that for sure.
But the documents still had a top-secret classified stamp on them.
Yeah, okay, fine.
Doesn't matter.
I guess people just don't...
We've never been in a situation where the FBI has knocked down the doors of a former president and...
He even raised an objection to a president doing this sort of thing.
But the president does not need a special stamp to declassify the documents.
He doesn't need to go through a process.
He doesn't need to ask permission of some deputy director of whatever the hell at the DOJ. If a former president says these documents were declassified at some point by me, they just are.
That's it.
It's completely made up.
If you begin with the false premise, then you can end at the crazy logical conclusion of that.
That's what the libs do.
But the premise is just wrong.
If a man can really be a woman, then you end up at trancing the kids.
But a man can't be a woman.
If Donald Trump can have mishandled the classified documents, then you end up at this place where maybe he committed a crime.
But he can't.
It's ontologically not possible for the president to do that.
If my aunt had testicles, she would be my uncle.
Speaking of the Biden administration, the Biden administration is pointing at Trump right now and raiding his home and calling half the country fascist and doing whatever distractions they can because of their completely failed record.
We know that they have a failed record on the economy.
We know they have a failed record on immigration.
We know they have an extremely failed record on foreign policy.
We know they got a failed record on energy.
The list goes on and on.
One area we haven't talked enough about, they have a really failed record on drugs.
The American life expectancy decreased again.
Okay, it should not be decreasing.
It's supposed to be increasing because of all that progress that we've allegedly got going on.
But it's decreasing, and it's decreasing in large part because of deaths of despair, specifically deaths caused by drug overdoses.
So, at the White House briefing, Karine Jean-Pierre is asked, hey, what is the president doing about drug overdoses?
Here's her answer.
There's a big problem now that Rainbow Fentanyl, which is designed to target children, has been found in 18 states.
What specifically is the president doing about this?
So, we just talked about the day, the overdose awareness day that we are observing today.
I just laid out what the second gentleman And others are doing within this administration.
And we are going to continue to focus on the steps that we're taking, that we have taken.
You have the $80 million that DHS just announced today on drug prevention.
And the president has taken many steps.
He's made this a priority.
So the only answer, they said we're going to spend $80 million on this vague thing.
She doesn't say what the $80 million is.
And then the only concrete action that Karine Jean-Pierre can say the Biden administration is doing on this once-in-an-ever historic drug overdose problem is, well, we're observing Drug Overdose Awareness Day.
What are you...
Peter, Doocy, are you crazy?
What do you mean we're not doing anything?
It's Overdose Awareness Day.
You know, we're all wearing a little pin.
You know, we posted a hashtag.
We did a hashtag.
And so, yeah, we're not doing anything about, you know, the completely open border that all the drugs are crossing from or crossing through.
We're not doing anything about big pharma.
We're not doing anything about the mass nationwide legalization campaign that our own party is pushing.
We're not doing anything about the criminal justice reform, so-called, that's letting all the drug peddlers out of prison.
We're raising awareness about No, yeah, the way that the White House is raising awareness about drug overdoses is by causing them.
That's what's raising awareness of it.
Awareness and $1.50 used to get you a cup of coffee, now you'd need probably like $5.50 in addition to the awareness to get a cup of coffee because of Bidenflation.
You need to do stuff to stop it, and the Democrats are not doing that.
They're actually encouraging the drug problem, and unfortunately a lot of Republicans are too.
I listened to, it was probably some of the stupidest political commentary I'd heard in a long time.
It came out a few days ago.
Charlemagne the God is a left-wing broadcaster.
And he had this idea for Joe Biden, which is that, politically it was actually probably a pretty smart idea.
As a matter of policy and the common good and the flourishing of America, it was a really terrible idea.
He says what Biden should do right now is just pardon every single person who is in prison for the devil's lettuce.
I thought it was incredibly disrespectful for Joe Biden to come out and say the sentence that Brittany Griner received in Russia was unacceptable.
It's like, yo, we live in a country where right now if Joe Biden wanted to, Don't need no votes, no nothing.
He could literally pardon every single person that is federally jailed for a non-violent weed offense.
He could pardon every single body.
This motherfucker's doing life in jail for an ounce and a half of marijuana right now.
My whole point is, man, when you live in a country where more than half of the country has legalized weed in some way, shape, or form, whether it's for medicinal, whether it's for recreational, to have people still locked up for marijuana and f*** America is ridiculous.
If I'm Joe Biden, you need this for the midterms, bro.
Okay?
I'm pardoning every single body that's locked up federally for a non-violent marijuana offense.
Let them all out.
So first of all, I think that's going to be the title of my next blank book.
That's my next magnum opus.
Everybody who's locked up in federal prison for a marijuana possession offense.
A comprehensive guide.
Because it's nobody.
It's nobody.
It's not real.
That's fake.
I gave a long speech on this some months ago, six months, eight months ago, called America's Under-Incarceration Problem.
I forget the exact statistic.
It's virtually no one.
And usually, even the people who are on the books in federal prison for marijuana possession, it's all plea deals.
It's all people who were peddlers, who were pushing harder stuff, or who had more than just simple possession.
And they pled it down, and then they go to the clink for a little bit.
But it virtually never happens.
Okay, but second of all, For the people on the right, the Republicans and the conservatives, who are into legalizing the Haitian oregano and the California cumin and the Peruvian parsley and all the rest of it, I just have to ask you a basic political question.
Do you think that that guy is right about politics?
That guy, Mr. Charlemagne over there?
Do you think that that pothead yes man that was sitting next to him on the podcast, do you think that guy gets it?
Do you think he's on the right side of politics?
Forget about pot for a second, just of all the political issues.
No.
Do you think the people who are pushing to let the drug dealers out of prison and who are pushing to legalize pot and put it in everybody's food, legalize it in cafes, and you're probably going to end up with it in your breakfast cereal.
Do you think, forget pot for a second, that those guys who are really into legalizing pot, where do they stand on abortion?
On...
On economic policy, on immigration, on marriage, on transgenderism, on foreign policy, on every single political issue, where do they stand?
My guess is they are on the wrong side of every single political issue.
And yet, I know there is a group of right-wingers who, for some reason, have convinced themselves that On this one issue, they're right.
They're not.
They're not.
Okay, don't let the wool be pulled over your eyes, my friends.
Speaking of us versus them kind of politics, before we get to the mailbag, I've got to get to this clip.
Really shocking.
It came out from Project Veritas.
a Connecticut public school's assistant principal was caught on camera discriminating against hiring Catholics because he says that if you hire Catholics, then they're not going to indoctrinate the kids well enough and they're not going to churn out Democrat voters in the future.
If you don't raise unquote quote, it's like a brain.
So if you find out someone is Catholic, then one.
I think one of the questions that we might start including is something about transgender students.
I don't think kids have enough knowledge to make decisions.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But if they're older, I'm not allowed to do that, but I can't tell them I'm not interviewing you because you're older.
I just don't interview you.
The times you're older you get, the more set your ways, the more conservative you get.
It doesn't matter what they think about it.
If they think about it in a logical, progressive way, that becomes their head.
So you kind of like do it on to think in a more liberal way?
The more progressive teachers are actually more savvy about delivering a democratic message without really ever mentioning politics.
We want people that are going to listen to the people.
We listen to the people.
It wasn't the Conservatives on the Supreme Court.
So it is.
Little things like that.
You hope those little things stick.
And then later down the line, you're going to vote Democrat.
And you will have signed a great service to our country.
That's it.
That's what they're going to do.
He's saying, we don't hire Catholics.
If someone is a really well-formed Catholic, they're never going to go with the libs.
They're not going to do it.
Too much Thomas Aquinas, so we can't hire them.
We've got to discriminate against them.
How are we going to do that legally?
We'll ask them about transgenderism, because they know.
This is one of the reasons the libs focus so much on transgenderism, because it just tells you everything.
If you believe that men can secretly be women, you're a leftist.
If you don't believe that, you're one of the bad people.
You might even be a Catholic, but you're certainly, you're one of those bad conservatives.
You're out.
If you're a little bit older, you might be more conservative.
Okay, we're not going to hire you.
We don't even need to mention explicit politics.
We are going to push this stuff on kids and churn out Democrat voters starting in kindergarten.
And, you know, to this guy's, in this guy's defense, he's acknowledging one basic truth.
There is no neutrality here, especially in education.
There's no neutrality.
They're either going to be trained in the conservative way or in the leftist way.
They're going to be trained in the atheist way or the Christian way or the Catholic way, maybe.
That's what he's really worried about.
It's gonna be some kind of training, that's what education is.
And so yeah, it's illegal for him to do what he's doing, to discriminate against Catholics and conservatives in the schools.
But he's doing a natural thing.
He's saying we want a certain type of education, not another type of education.
Maybe conservatives need to start thinking that way too.
I talk a lot on this show about the squishes.
You know, the Adam Kinzinger's, the future former Congress lady, Liz Cheney, whose gelatinous GOP spines, they just fall apart under the slightest pressure.
It's the kind of pressure, kind of behavior, rather, that you would never dream of engaging in or modeling to your son or daughter.
And yet, and yet, The numbers are in.
Most of you squished this very morning.
You did.
You might not have even known it.
Some of you are squishing right now.
Well, Michael, don't be so mean to me.
What are you talking about?
Hey, look, it's not me.
If you are still not shaving with a Jeremy's razor, if you are still using a razor made by a company that says that you're toxic You are, one, shaming yourself, and two, funding the radical gender ideologues who wish that you would just disappear down a drain along with that unwanted stubble.
Don't squish on your values.
Switch to Jeremy's Razors and get your Founders Series Shave Kit today.
Go to jeremysrazors.com.
Now, finally, we have gotten to my favorite time of the week when I get to hear from you in the mailbag.
The mailbag is sponsored by Pure Talk at puretalk.com.
Select a plan, enter promo code Knowles Podcast to get your second month for free.
Let's take it away with the voice mailbag.
I'm just a Knowles.
I'm a 16-year-old high school student in Florida who is fortunate enough to be blessed with the governorship of Ron DeSantis, but putting that aside, I'm taking an AP Environmental Studies class this year, and I'm doing that for the purpose of getting my GPA up and my grades, etc., But the consequence of taking an AP environmental class is I fundamentally disagree with a lot of the stuff the teacher says about stuff like global warming and climate change and etc.
And I don't want to just debate teaching class or anything or sacrifice my grades.
But I also don't want to just sit idly by as I hear what I fundamentally disagree with.
So what do you think I should do in this situation?
Really great question.
And I love that little caveat.
You said, look, I'm not there to debate the teacher.
And that's true.
You're actually not there to debate the teacher.
When you sign up for a course, you are there to learn something.
And so you should learn whatever you can.
You can learn things from very flawed people.
You can learn things from very ignorant people.
You can learn something from just about anybody.
There's a kind of old expression about this.
Every man is my teacher.
I can learn something from him.
So learn what you can.
When the teacher starts spouting nonsense, okay, you're not going to learn much from that.
Tune that out.
Now, if the teacher calls on you, says, what do you think about this?
Or asks you to write a paper, or starts interrogating you in class, then, and this is important, Then you speak up and you say what you really think.
I am not of the opinion that you should lie or hide your views or pretend to be a different person just to get a decent grade in the AP course and then you'll go to college.
And then, well, then you'll have to hide your views and lie about them and squish too.
But then the only reason you'll do that is because then you'll get a good job.
And then when you get a good job, that's when you'll, oh, well, you'll probably have to squish.
I mean, you're going to be a first year at your new job, and so you're not going to want to offend the upper management.
But it's okay.
Once you move up, maybe you're in middle management, then you can, well, you're going to have to squish, too.
It's not your job to have opinions, you know, and you don't want to contradict the bosses, ruffle any feathers, but that's okay.
Maybe someday you'll become the CEO of the company.
And then you're going to, well, you probably can't say your opinion then either, by golly.
You have responsibilities, maybe to your shareholders, maybe to your investors.
You've got to do what's best for the company.
Oh, and then you're going to die, and then you'll have never had integrity at all.
So, I'm not of that opinion.
But you need to be wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove.
You need to...
Express your views and stand by your views, but you don't need to be flamboyant about it.
You don't need to wear the MAGA hat to AP Environmental Studies class every single day.
Next question.
Greetings, exalted Nostradamus.
Peace be upon you.
I have a question for you about acting.
I've been acting in theater for about eight years now, and I've recently secured an agent to pursue acting professionally.
However, I have some concerns about the increasingly profane, obscene, and sexual content that you see in TV and movies these days, and that I may be expected to do or say things for the camera or on stage that directly contradict my morals.
So I was wondering if there is any grey area regarding what you do as an actor, morally speaking, because since I'm only pretending, is it possible to do or say sinful things while remaining inculpable?
Because my heart is in the right place and my intention is merely to entertain the audience.
Basically, my question is, Jim Caviezel or Mark Wahlberg?
Thank you.
This is such a good question.
And I was just discussing this last night with the Clavens, Spencer Claven and Drew Claven.
And, you know, Spencer and I, we probably met for the very first time when we were doing plays and operas and things in college.
So, you know, we've been thinking about this question for a long time.
And I think it's like the IQ bell curve meme.
At the really dumb, stupid, idiot, drooling end of the spectrum, the guy's going to say, duh, I don't know, actors are kind of liars, and they're doing bad stuff, and that's bad.
And then you get into the middle of the IQ bell curve meme, and they say, no, actually, when you're acting a role, it's completely divorced from your own person, and you have no culpability whatsoever for the things you're thinking and doing.
Come on, it plays a play.
And then at the highest end of the IQ bell curve meme, I think you go back to the drooling guy, and I think you say...
No, actually, there's a reason they weren't allowed in restaurants for a lot of history.
There's a reason they were lumped together with criminals and prostitutes for most of history.
There's a reason that the church took a pretty hard line against acting as a profession and the theater broadly for roughly 1,400 to 1,600 years.
Because it is a complicated question.
And it's a little bit different.
When you are a writer...
And you write a story about, I don't know, a rape and a murder and terrorism and a serial killer.
Your mind is wandering in certain places.
You are sometimes opening up wounds.
You're sometimes indulging kind of disordered thoughts and even desires.
And then you put it on paper and that's that.
It's an action only of the mind.
When you are...
Attending a play or watching a movie.
You are allowing yourself to indulge certain desires and things that could be disordered and not great for your soul.
But again, it is just in the mind.
It's not really in the body.
When you are acting uniquely, when you are acting, you are putting all of this into your body.
And so you are really doing it, and because we're incarnate creatures, that affects us.
This is especially true after what is colloquially referred to as method acting comes about, which all comes out of Freud.
You have Freud come about, you have the kind of psychological revolution of the 19th century, late 19th century, and early 20th century.
Then in Russia, you have the Stanislavski system, which is the first kind of method acting, where Stanislavski, the director of the Moscow Art Theater, says, we're no longer going to have representational stilted acting, where you're basically like a glorified mime.
No, you're going to develop the inner life of your character, and you're going to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances.
Out of that, then in New York, you get the group theater.
The group theater is...
People like Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, all these people.
And they're all a bunch of communists, and they're all really into this stuff where your inner life, it's all coming from the subconscious.
And they all do a lot of weird stuff.
Lee Strasberg, one of the great acting teachers in New York, won't name him, but...
He referred to Lee Strasberg as a pervert and a voyeur.
And a lot of it, when people really get into the method, or any of this, the Meisner technique or the Adler technique, sometimes it really can mess you up.
Actors are all completely insane.
And it really can warp your soul and your body.
So I'm not going to give you the easy answer of, hey, don't worry about it, it's okay.
No, you have to be very careful about it because it is your mind and it is your soul and it is your body.
Next question.
Hi, Michael.
Big fan of the show.
I think that too often the left gains ground by defining the parameters by which conservatives are allowed to speak.
One of those areas is the area of sexual orientation.
Here's what I mean.
The terms homosexual and heterosexual were once used exclusively as adjectives to describe certain kinds of behavior.
But the left, I think, has turned them into nouns.
Now somebody can utter the sentence, I am a homosexual and nobody blinks twice.
I believe this to be a purely ideological phenomenon that was aided by the medical community.
I don't believe there is such a thing as quote-unquote being straight or being gay.
I just believe there are beneficial preferences which are to be pursued and harmful preferences which are to be suppressed.
This dichotomy can be seen in every category of possible human desire, such as food, clothes, music, etc., but none of these has anything to do with identity.
My question is, Do you think it's time conservatives abandoned the idea that sexual preference has anything to do with one's identity at all?
Thanks.
Love the show.
Yes, really, really excellent, incisive question.
And you're absolutely right, except a little bit at the end.
Because sexual preference can have something to do with identity if you make it your identity.
Just like race can have a whole lot to do with your identity if you make it your identity.
Just like some interest that you have, some hobby.
You work on model toy trains.
That can be your identity if you make it your identity.
But when you place your identity in small, particular, contingent, often material things, then you're not going to be happy.
You will not flourish because our identity has to be grounded in God in order for it to achieve its fullest expression.
Because we are essentially children of God.
We are made in the image of God.
God is the essence of being.
He says to Moses at the burning bush, My name is I am who I am.
I am being himself.
And so when we have our identity in I am who I am, we know who we are.
When we put our identity anywhere else, we don't know who we are.
We're left with a sort of silly, pathetic question.
Who am I? Who am I? I've got to go find myself.
And that's certainly true now.
We're all obsessed with the sexual identity stuff.
But you're absolutely right when you say these things.
In all categories of human desire, there are better and worse things to pursue.
And so if you ground your identity in God and objective moral order, that will give you guidance to that.
And you won't be left with like a 13-year-old girl just saying like, hey, man, what am I?
You know, I'm more of a black metal punk, visco kind of pansexual, whatever.
I don't know.
I don't know how the kids talk these days.
But you won't be left with that kind of silly, shallow understanding of identity.
You'll know who you are.
You'll have grown up.
One time, I was mentioning to a friend of mine that a conservative friend of ours used all these stupid political monikers.
It's the right-wing version of gender pronouns.
I am a minarchistic, libertarian, anarcho-traditional syndicalist, or whatever, all this stuff.
And my friend just, he sighed.
He said, oh, just grow up.
Just grow up.
Enough with all the stupid identity markers.
Okay, next question.
Hey Michael, James here.
I just saw a PragerU poll that asks who you would save, your dog or a stranger.
60% of the 30,000 respondents said they would save their dog.
Is there a single greater indicator of a sick and dying society?
Thanks, bye.
That's a pretty good one.
You're right.
And the reason they would save their dogs, by the way, is not even because they just necessarily hate people.
It's because they think their dogs are their kids.
People no longer treat dogs as dogs.
They treat dogs as kids because people don't really have kids anymore.
And people are not even comfortable not having kids.
And they often don't have the strength and confidence and encouragement to pursue that life, which can be very difficult because they're not grounding their identity in anything beyond just sort of fleeting pleasure and an eternal present.
So, yeah, they would save their dogs over the drowning person because their dog to them is their kid.
But they don't realize the dog is a dog.
Okay?
And it's a sick society that thinks that dogs are kids.
Okay, one question that is written before we get into the member block.
We had a lot of fun stuff in the member block today.
We've got Kirk Cameron stopping by.
We've got more mail.
I like to do the extended mailbag in the member block because I only get to one old school...
Written out question with all the voicemail bags, so we'll get to that in the member block too.
Before we get to that though, from Abby Michael, been marinating on your discussion about dating apps last week regarding Kayleigh McEnany's sister launching a dating app for conservatives.
It's a good start, but we need to stop treating singles like little islands.
I suggest we take it a step further and launch the Yenta app, Fiddler on the Roof, where families do their job and connect loved ones.
We as individuals are not the best at understanding what we need comprehensively.
We need family input to get the 360.
Bring family back into dating.
Thoughts love the show.
Yeah, I think it's good to have family and close friends be involved in this kind of thing.
There was that story that just came out about how young people aren't having drinks on their first dates anymore, and one of the explanations for this is that they don't want to get date-raped.
They don't want the random stranger that they're meeting up with to slip them a Mickey and drag them home.
And now there are all of these completely misaligned expectations of what it means to go on a first date.
And what are you going to do after the first date or the second date or the third date?
And so now people are so on guard that they go and what should be a nice little love affair, you know, you meet and you enjoy someone's company.
Now you're on guard because you don't want them to rape you because you're meeting a stranger.
So, yeah, part of the explanation for that is because we have no idea who these people are now because we're just swiping them like commodities on our phones, on our little portals to hell.
Instead of a situation where you say, oh, yeah, John, yeah, John was roommates with Billy and Billy is my sister's boyfriend.
And so we know all these people for many years.
Oh, it's my cousin's co-worker who's known for this.
And when you have a much more tightly knit social group, you have much more trust in people.
And so it makes the dates go better.
It also makes society function a lot better as well.
Okay, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
