Click here to join the member exclusive portion of my show: https://utm.io/ueSEl
Greta and Klaus Schwab showdown at Davos, a world economic forum panelist syas that hate speech laws are coming to the United States, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis destroys one of the key aspects of that great reset agenda by going after ESG.
- - -
DailyWire+:
Use code DO NOT COMPLY to get 40% OFF new annual DailyWire+ membership plans: https://bit.ly/3SsC5se
Get your Michael Knowles merch here: https://bit.ly/3X6tlKY
- - -
Today’s Sponsors:
PureTalk - Get 50% off your first month with promo code ‘KNOWLES’’ https://www.puretalkusa.com/landing/KNOWLES
- - -
Socials:
Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3RwKpq6
Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3BqZLXA
Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eEmwyg
Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3L273Ek
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sparks flew yesterday at the World Economic Forum as the environmentalist globalists started attacking the globalist environmentalists after Greta Thunberg arrived in Davos.
We are right now in Davos, where basically the people who are mostly fueling the destruction of the planet, the people who are at the very core of the climate crisis, the people who are investing in fossil fuels, etc., etc., And yet somehow these are the people that we seem to rely on solving our problems, where they have proven time and time again that they are not prioritizing that.
They are prioritizing self-greed, corporate greed, and short-term economic profits above people and above planets.
And we seem to be listening to them rather than the people who are actually affected by the climate crisis, the people who are living on the front lines and...
And that kind of tells us the situation, how absurd this is.
The whole episode resembled the Iran-Iraq war, in that normal people wish that both sides could lose.
But even more than that, the fight resembled a stage play.
The liberal elites' wunderkind showing up to the fancy party in Switzerland to tell them all how very naughty they've been.
All to the fawning praise and applause of the elites who lapped up the performative abuse.
A tawdry affair and a play-acted fight for the cameras.
While behind closed doors, the globalist agenda moved forward full steam ahead.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Big G, who says, If John Kerry couldn't get his friends off a remote island back when he was Thurston Howell III, how is he supposed to save the world?
That's so true.
John, if you're going to save the world, how about you get off that island, huh?
Lovey, you can't even keep your marriage in check, John.
Lovey, bring me another coconut, please.
I'm saving the planet, lovey.
When you want to talk to all of your friends, you don't need to fly to a fancy Alpine town in Switzerland.
You can just pick up Pure Talk.
Right now, head on over to puretalk.com, enter promo code Knolls.
If you are planning this year to do business with companies that share what you believe in, you got to check out Pure Talk.
Pure Talk is the antidote to woke wireless companies.
It is proudly veteran-owned, employs a US-based customer service team, and absolutely refuses to spend money on fake news networks.
Not to mention, Pure Talk service is fantastic.
One of the largest networks in the country.
You can get blazing fast data talk and text for as low as $30 a month.
That's probably half of what you're paying Verizon, ATT, and T-Mobile.
Switch over to PureTalk.
It takes just 10 minutes while keeping your phone and your phone number.
Your first month is guaranteed risk-free.
Try it.
If you're not totally happy with the service, you get your money back.
There is nothing to lose here except those high bills.
This year, make it a goal to support the companies that support you.
Go to PureTalk.com, enter promo code Knowles to save 50% off your first month.
PureTalk.com, promo code Knowles.
PureTalk is simply smarter wireless.
Amid all of the silly little play-for-the-cameras things that happened at the World Economic Forum, like the Greta Thunberg performances and all the rest of it, There was some scary stuff that went down.
The European Commission Vice President made a claim that should put a little bit of fear in every single American.
This European Commission VP said that the United States soon will follow Western Europe in banning hate speech.
We need the people who understand the language and the case law in the country.
Because what qualifies as hate speech, as illegal hate speech, which you will have soon also in the US, I think that we have a strong reason why we have this in the criminal law.
We need the platforms to simply work with the language and to identify such cases.
The AI would be too dangerous.
Yes, you will soon have it there in the United States because we will make sure that you have it there.
Because we are going to take this rabbit-narrow opportunity to reset the world.
That was the subtext of what she was saying.
Most conservatives are listening to that and saying, No, you won't, Dagnabbit.
We're going to stand firm on our First Amendment.
You're never going to make us give up free speech.
She's right.
She's right.
Some version of hate speech laws are coming to the United States.
In fact, they're already here.
We already have versions of hate speech laws.
If you commit a crime, if you rob a guy and you take his wallet and you say, hey, pal, I'm going to take your wallet.
You take it and you go away.
Then you'll be charged with robbery.
If you go up to that same guy and you say, hey, N-word, hey, F-A-G-G-O-T, hey, whatever, insert whatever slur you want, I'm going to take your wallet.
You will be charged with robbery and a hate crime.
And the only differentiating factor, the only thing that would distinguish the two robberies, would be your speech.
Speech is increasingly criminalized according to the standards of the ruling liberal elite, what they consider to be offensive.
Furthermore, as I wrote in my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, do I not have a bell in my hotel room?
I want my bell.
According to my book, as I explained pretty clearly there, there have always been We still theoretically ban obscenity.
We've had blasphemy laws on the books.
This is true in every single society.
So when the Davos elites say, you're going to get some form of hate speech laws, we can either put our heads in the sand and pretend that that's not true and say, la, la, la, la, la, I've got the First Amendment, which is going to protect me for saying anything that I want to say, which is not true now and has never been true.
Or we can actually engage with the issue and say, okay, yeah, we're going to have standards and norms of speech.
It can either be the insane backward Davos liberal standards, or we can assert our own standards.
But we bury our heads in the sand at our own risk.
Because these people, even though they're trying to downplay their power right now, they have a lot of power, and they've got a lot of power specifically in the United States.
So the effective conservatives are the ones who are pushing back specifically on their agenda.
Where are we seeing this most clearly?
We're seeing it down in Florida.
We're seeing it with Governor Ron DeSantis, who has just announced that Florida will join a number of other Republican states in divesting from asset managers that push an ESG agenda, environmental, social, and governance policies, which basically just means radical wokeism.
DeSantis said that the approval of this resolution will ensure that public fiduciaries, quote, So, what DeSantis is saying here is, we're not going to buy into the World Economic Forum view of capitalism,
which they call stakeholder capitalism.
Stakeholder capitalism says...
It's not just shareholders, but every group in society is going to have some say in how businesses are run, and businesses are going to be accountable not just to the shareholders, but to the locals, and to the consumers, and to the suppliers.
And how exactly is this going to work?
Everything's a little vague when it gets to the specifics.
But they say shareholder capitalism is not the way of the future.
Shareholder capitalism is the system that we have right now.
It says that the only duty of a company is to maximize profits for shareholders.
And it has led to a lot of material prosperity in the last 50 years.
But it's only really been about 50 years since shareholder capitalism became the dominant form of conducting business in the United States.
The defenders of shareholder capitalism, the people you hear as the free market absolutists, the disciples of Milton Friedman, they are going to try to tell you that shareholder capitalism is some ancient sacred idea.
It's not.
It has been useful in many, many ways, but it isn't all that old.
The critics of stakeholder capitalism, the woke stuff that the World Economic Forum is pushing, they're going to try to tell you But it's not brand new, actually.
Stakeholder capitalism, the idea that companies ought to be responsible to more than just the shareholders of those companies, that's an idea that goes back at least to 1932.
It probably goes back a little earlier than that, though now we're just using these terms to discuss more complex ideas.
Because the economy is a complex thing, and political philosophy is a complex thing.
So what are we going to do?
do.
To stop stakeholder capitalism, the left-wing version of it, this is a fine way to do it.
It's a fine way practically to say, we're going to divest from BlackRock.
We're going to divest from State Street.
We're going to divest from Vanguard.
And how are we going to do it?
We're going to repeat the same things that Milton Friedman told us in the 70s and the 80s.
That's fine in the short term.
But in the long term, we are going to have to deal with some of the real criticism, some of the legitimate criticisms of the economic policies of the last 50 years.
Because the knock on those policies is legit.
The knock is that it exacerbates economic inequality and it breaks down social solidarity.
And you as a conservative might not care all that much about economic inequality.
It doesn't bother me in principle, but it does actually bother me in practice.
Because when economic inequality becomes too drastic, people start getting a little antsy and they start getting a little violent and society can break down.
And this can cause or at least be associated with a breakdown in social solidarity.
But the breakdown in social solidarity comes from a lot of other features of the economy too.
An economic policy, for instance, which we've had for the last 50 years, that tells women that they should get a job.
They should leave the home.
They should delay having children.
They should kill their babies if they do get pregnant.
They should have multiple partners and not settle down and not raise a family at an early age.
That kind of capitalism, and you're hearing that message as much from the right-wing capitalists as you are, from the left-wing feminists and radicals and free-love type people.
That is going to cause a breakdown in society, and that's a problem.
So I don't want to sound like a pinko over here, okay?
I don't mean to sound like I'm going to go dye my hair purple and start marching with Greta Thunberg or anything like that.
But I think conservatives need to be Completely unsentimental.
And we need to give credit where credit is due when it comes to diagnoses of these problems.
The libs, I mean, going back to Karl Marx, the libs are not bad at criticizing certain aspects of society.
They don't have good solutions for what to do about it.
But that's what we need to do.
And so, the long-term solution here is going to be, okay, if there are issues with the economic policies from the 1970s, let's address them.
And let's not just dig up the graves of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan.
They fought their battles.
They did good for their time, I think.
They did just fine.
Now, we have to fight our battles, too.
And if the libs are going to be the only people addressing these issues, then the libs are going to be the ones to continue to wield political control.
You know...
The most celebrated interview show on the internet.
Many people are talking about it.
Listen, everybody, everybody I talk to is talking about it, has just turned into the greatest party game.
That would be yes or no.
The game is back by popular demand.
It is a game some might call harmful, filled with hate speech, conspiracy content, and unsafe by design.
But whatever you want to call it, it is available for pre-order right now.
We ordered something like a thousand copies of it just as a little test run before Christmas.
Sold out immediately.
Unfortunately, we weren't able to get more in before Christmas.
We have just ordered a few thousand more copies, maybe even a little more than that.
It is going to sell out again, so make sure you get your copy pre-ordered today.
You know, it's almost bittersweet that we sold out so quickly last time, but I think that we'd all stand to benefit if a certain party going on in Switzerland took some time to play, okay?
I really do wish we could have sent some over there to Davos.
So head on over to dailywire.com slash shop to pre-order yes or no today.
Speaking of institutionalized wokeness, there's some basketball player.
You know me.
I don't follow sports very closely.
Baseball is the only one that I really follow much at all.
But there's this basketball player.
His name is Provorov.
And Provorov has a religious objection to putting on the gay pride flag on his jersey.
And he was told by his team that he had to wear a gay pride flag jersey.
And he said, no, I'm Christian.
That actually contradicts my faith.
So no thanks.
I'm not going to wear the jersey.
And they said, you have to wear the jersey.
He said, I don't want to wear the jersey.
And it was like that scene in Seinfeld when, during AIDS, everyone wanted you to wear a little ribbon on your clothing.
And Kramer said, I don't want to wear the ribbon.
He said, wear the ribbon!
Why aren't you wearing the ribbon?
And it has reached such a fever pitch that some Looney Tunes anchor just went on an unhinged rant about this man not wanting to wear a gay symbol on his body.
The theme is not, hockey is for everyone, dot, dot, dot, unless you don't believe in gay rights, then do whatever you want.
If the National Hockey League is going to do this, if any league is going to do this, do it properly or reevaluate what you're doing.
Because there's not a lot of repercussions that I'm seeing from any league.
Now, it could change with the NHL. It could change with the NHL. I think you find the Flyers a million dollars for this.
I'm not kidding.
Figure this out and stop offending people on nights where it's not about that.
It's supposed to be about inclusivity.
The National Hockey League need to attack this and figure this out.
Because what I heard last night was offensive and didn't make any sense.
Because, for instance, if that was a military night...
If anyone in Canada or in the States on a military appreciation night wouldn't wear a jersey pre-game, do you have any idea the uproar that would have happened on that?
Do you have any idea the backlash?
Do you have any idea what happened on social media?
It's ridiculous.
Do you have any idea?
I'm laughing for a couple of reasons.
One is, I just proved my thesis that I don't know anything about sports because I thought it was a basketball player, but it's a hockey player.
Okay, alright.
Actually, I prefer hockey to basketball.
It's more fights.
It's a little bit more exciting.
Manly sport, isn't it?
And in this manly sport, this Christian guy says, I don't want to wear the gay thing.
Please don't make me wear the gay thing.
And then this Looney Tune on the NHL channel, he says, could you imagine if a player didn't want to wear a jersey honoring military veterans?
As if to say that a man who goes out there and fights for his country, risks his life to go kill the bad guys and protect our freedom and our traditions, that that is the same thing as a guy who really, really, really likes doing weird sex stuff.
Both of those things are equally deserving of our admiration.
Well, Colonel, I really appreciate the sacrifice you made being wounded overseas to protect my country.
And you, Julio, I'm glad that you went to the bathhouse yesterday.
I find both of those things so terribly honorable.
Give me both of your jerseys.
No.
No.
One of those things is admirable.
One of those things is at best kind of weird and a matter that we don't need to talk about all that much publicly.
That's the best case scenario, okay?
Couldn't you imagine?
The guy, he seems genuinely confused.
And he goes on.
Nothing scares me more than any human being who says, I'm not doing this because of my religious beliefs.
Because when you looked at people's lives, you normally say that publicly, you'd throw up at what you saw.
You would throw up at what you saw.
And I have seen that a million times in a lot of different ways.
So don't give me that.
With respect.
Don't give me that because no one's perfect.
Alright?
Don't feed me the religious beliefs line.
And all of a sudden the NHL is going to back off this.
The National Hockey League today needs to find that organization a million dollars and reevaluate how they support gay rights.
Because that is insulting.
That is the number one trending topic in Canada.
That is insulting what happened in Philadelphia.
Remember when the argument was, hey, what's it matter to you?
Hey, man, what's your hang-up?
Why do you care what people do in their bedrooms?
It doesn't affect your life.
But if you don't wear the gay t-shirt, we're going to fine you a million dollars.
But it doesn't affect you.
Hey, come on.
How does my gay marriage affect your real marriage?
It doesn't affect you.
But give me a million dollars if you ever so much as even cast a slight glance of aspersion on the glorious, wonderful thing we call homosexual sexual behavior.
How dare you?
That would be like insulting a military veteran.
You see how that...
And do you remember at the time when the Libs said all that, the conservatives said, no, man, it's actually a slippery slope, and we're not all just free-floating atoms, so things that affect anyone and certainly groups of people end up affecting all of society.
And they say, shut up, bigot!
Shut up with your stupid religion!
And wear the t-shirt of my religion!
Get your religion out of public!
Wear my religion!
Wear my flag!
Wear my symbols!
Except my moral order, my immoral order, frankly, is what the left is pushing.
And he used one of the shallowest arguments you'll ever hear.
He said, I'm sick and tired of people invoking their religion, especially these Christians.
That's what he was insinuating.
He's calling out a Christian in particular.
He said, these religious people generally.
Do you know, some of these Christians, they sin.
Did you know that?
They commit sins.
Yeah, so you better not have any standard of right and wrong, good and bad.
You better not try to do good and avoid evil because you're a fallen creature and you sin.
So therefore, you're a hypocrite.
Having a standard and falling short of that standard is not hypocrisy.
We use the word hypocrisy today in a way that is very, very silly.
Having a standard and falling short of that standard, as you sincerely try to uphold that standard, is called being human and pursuing virtue.
And it is central to the Christian life.
It is the premise of Christianity, that mankind has fallen.
We can't save ourselves.
We are in need of a savior.
We require God's grace if we are to have salvation.
That's it.
And this man, this obvious religious bigot, is demonstrating his ignorance and his intolerance and all the things that he accuses us of.
So maybe the next time that there is a cultural issue that comes up and those crazy right-wing, probably religious, fanatical types try to draw a line in the sand and say, hey, this is not good, this is going to affect society, Maybe don't throw the nonsense back at them and say, oh, how does this affect you?
Politics affects all of us.
That's why it's politics.
That's what politics means.
Politics means public.
Speaking of LGBT-ism, I just read the most disturbing story maybe that I have ever read.
Most disturbing news story.
I'm not going to read it.
I'm not going to go too into detail at all because this is just...
Horrifying.
It's by Mia Cathel on Town Hall.
I hope I'm not mispronouncing Mia's last name.
Headline tapes.
We investigated a suburban LGBT pedophile ring.
Here's what we found.
And it's a story of these two guys, these two gay guys who are in a gay marriage, and they adopted children, two male children.
They adopted the children from a nominally Christian adoption agency.
Obviously, a Christian adoption agency that endorses same-sex marriage adoption.
It would be hard for me to understand how that's a Christian adoption agency.
But they do it, and then the guys just...
Constantly raped the children.
Just very young children.
Now that the guys have been caught, the children are ages 9 and 11.
They bragged about raping the children.
They made all sorts of videos and things.
They invited their friends to do it.
If you want to read the grisly details, it's over at Town Hall.
You can give it a read.
Not for the faint of heart, so I don't necessarily recommend you do it.
Obviously these men, if they are guilty of what they are accused of doing, obviously they should be executed.
There's no question about that as far as I'm concerned.
Even if you are a little worried about the death penalty, and even if you have objections to the death penalty, which I do not, I think the death penalty is perfectly just and legitimate and Christian and acceptable.
But even if you do, one, I think, irrefutable argument for the death penalty beyond mere retribution, which I think is ultimately the point of all criminal justice.
But beyond that, you would have to say that for the purposes of protecting the public from the further predations of these animals, these absolute criminals, the death penalty would be justified.
At the very least to protect people, if not purely for the purpose of justice and retribution.
At least to protect people.
And you know, with the way that our justice system works now, if these pedos go to prison, well, if there were justice in the prison system, they would not last very long in prison.
But if they did make it, you know they'd be let out.
You know they'd be let out.
We don't keep criminals in jail in this country.
Not these days.
They probably would be let out, and what would they do?
They'd do it again.
So, sure, I think most reasonable people agree these two men should be executed very swiftly for what they did.
But when will we address the broader issues?
Are we going to address the broader issue?
Are we willing to end the absurd and barbaric practice of same-sex and single-parent adoption?
And certainly when it comes to single-parent adoption, certainly single-male parent adoption.
I think single parent adoption generally should be discouraged, if not just made illegal outright.
Certainly same-sex adoption should be illegal.
A child has a right to his natural mother and father to be conceived within the context of a marriage and in the conjugal act of his parents.
We know that there are something like 36 couples trying to adopt every newborn baby put up for adoption in the United States.
There's no shortage of mommies and daddies married to one another who want to adopt babies.
Okay, there's no shortage of that at all.
And yet, because of wokeness and political correctness, we've got to say, no, well, we shouldn't discriminate against gay men or single parents who want to adopt.
But of course we should, because it's not about the adults.
Whether they want to satisfy the most horrific lusts they could have or whether they just want a kid and they didn't get married and they just want to have a kid.
We know that it is better for a child to be raised in a marriage, in a real marriage with a mother and a father.
And so, at the very least, for newborn babies, where the situation is really, really straightforward, we should prioritize the children over the parents.
No question about that.
We're not allowed to say that.
That's not politically correct.
We're not allowed to point out that...
Child sex abuse is much more prevalent among LGBT-identified people.
I'm not saying all gay guys are child abusers.
Obviously, that is not the case.
The vast majority of gay guys are not child abusers.
But the numbers are the numbers.
The LGBT identification in the United States is 7.1%.
That's according to Gallup.
According to the Williams Institute at UCLA Law, so not some far-right think tank, according to a very liberal, storied institution...
20% of registered sex offenders identify as LGBT. We're not allowed to say that.
We're not allowed to confront that fact because it's politically incorrect.
So what happens?
These stories pop up and you don't read about it anywhere.
You read about it in town hall, maybe you hear it on my show and that's it, and it gets buried.
For what?
So that we can continue perpetuating lies that harm all of society, that harm certain people specifically, but harm all of us when we are forced to live in a culture of lies.
We should say no to that.
This month, we are celebrating the anniversary of one of the greatest moments in Daily Wire history, when we said no to Joe Biden.
After months of leading the legal battle against the federal government and a national Do Not Comply campaign, the Supreme Court ruled in our favor, blocked the Biden administration's outrageous vaccine mandate.
See, that was a Freudian slip.
I almost said the Obama.
It's kind of like the O'Biden administration.
It's just the third term.
For Barack Obama, this mandate would have set a dangerous precedent, giving the unelected OSHA power over the personal medical decisions of American citizens.
The Supreme Court recognized this gross power grab, obviously made the right decision.
We are so proud to have led the charge in this fight.
We could not have done it without you.
Thousands of you joined the Daily Wire.
Over a million Americans signed our petition against the mandates.
To celebrate, we are offering 40% off our annual memberships with the code DO NOT COMPLY. Life would have been really tough had that mandate gone into effect, not just for us at The Daily Wire, but for everybody out there who works for a private business.
So celebrate one of the great moments in Daily Wire history with 40% off on your annual membership.
Join now at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Join the winning team as we continue to crush the libs.
Speaking of political dishonesty, the White House has still not managed to come up with a coherent and uniform line to answer for Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents.
Mishandling of documents when he had no right to do it.
Unlike Trump, Joe Biden was not the president.
When he was allegedly mishandling these documents.
Unlike Trump, they weren't just locked in a closet where the National Archives knew where they were.
They were in his garage.
They were in a garage that Hunter had access to and used, Hunter Biden, while he was shilling his influence for the Ukrainians and the Chinese.
Highly sensitive classified documents in that garage.
Classified documents in Joe Biden's fake think tank, which was funded by the Chinese communists.
You think the donors maybe took a walk through the office, maybe had some access to those documents?
Entirely plausible.
No.
No, no.
They haven't come up with an answer to it.
In fact, Karine Jean-Pierre is pretty much just walking out because she can't answer.
You told me six times.
That turned out to be false.
Are you sorry about that?
I'll see you tomorrow.
Come talk to me.
I'll see you tomorrow.
There she is.
And the reporter you heard, the first part was a little bit cut off by the microphones, was James Rosen, who's a very serious journalist.
He's worked for...
Slightly more right-wing outlets.
He worked for Fox News for a while.
But James Rosen is considered a very, very mainstream journalist.
He pointed out at least six times that KJP had claimed that all Biden-classified documents were accounted for and that turned out to be false.
So she either was completely ignorant or she was lying.
And so he said, hey, you can't lie to us.
I know that your job is to spin, but you can't really lie or you're going to apologize.
She says, bye.
See, I'm not even going to acknowledge it.
But we know this because Joe Biden is, even by politician standards, the most notorious liar in our political life today.
More than Trump.
I'm not saying Trump has never said anything that isn't totally true, but...
Biden has said many more significant, serious lies for longer.
Barack Obama has told very, very serious lies.
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
Biden still got him beat.
Hillary, Bill, well, I did not have sexual relations.
Biden still got him beat.
And now we just found out proof that Biden lied again.
Biden claimed...
Just a few days ago, we talked about it on the show, that he grew up in a black Protestant church, which was a little strange when he said it, because Biden constantly brags about how he's a devout Catholic, even though he doesn't believe undeniable truths required dogmas of the Catholic Church.
Joe Biden, nevertheless, presents himself as this devout Catholic.
So how could a devout Catholic every day after Mass go worship in a black—well, it doesn't matter if it's a black church.
He called it a black church because he also is offensively denying that there are black Catholics, of which there are many.
But to go to a Protestant church, that itself would be considered a sin.
In the Catholic Church.
No one believed it anyway, though.
Do you seriously believe that Corn Pop took Joe to the black church after?
No, of course not.
And now we have proof of it because Joe Biden was at Raphael Warnock's church and there were some real spiritual hymns going on.
People were moving, they were flowing, they were clapping.
Joe Biden couldn't move.
Here he is.
You see all the choir in the background singing about the spirit.
And Biden doesn't know what to do.
Even Warnock, he's clapping.
Everybody out there in the congregation.
What is Biden doing?
He raises his hand.
Uh...
Hmm...
What do I do?
That is not a man who has ever seriously attended a black Protestant church.
You gotta move.
He reminds like the opening scene of The Jerk with Steve Martin.
I was born a poor black child.
And then he's there and the way that he finds out he's adopted is because he can't dance because he doesn't have any rhythm.
Certainly Joe Biden too.
Now speaking of contrasting leadership...
As the World Economic Forum 2023 wraps up, this is an important year for the World Economic Forum because it marks the first year in my life that there has been widespread attention to this globalist meetup in the middle of the Swiss Alps in a very, very rarefied territory that's very expensive to get to.
And the reason it's held there is because it's hard to get to and you're not going to have a lot of protesters making it all the way up the mountain in the Swiss Alps.
And now a lot of people are paying attention to it.
Don't forget, though, Donald Trump showed up to the World Economic Forum back in 2018.
But unlike the Swiss Republicans who have gone, Donald Trump showed up to the World Economic Forum with a clear message for the globalist liberals.
I'm a man.
That your strong leadership is open to misconceptions and biased interpretations.
Therefore, it is so essential for us in the room to listen directly to you.
I'm here today to represent the interests of the American people.
The world is witnessing the resurgence of a strong and prosperous America.
I'm here to deliver a simple message.
There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest, and to grow in the United States.
Regulation is stealth taxation.
The U.S., like many other countries, unelected bureaucrats, and we have, believe me, we have them all over the place, and they've imposed crushing and anti-business and anti-worker regulations on our citizens.
With no vote, no legislative debate, and no real accountability.
In America, those days are over.
He showed up to the World Economic Forum to tell these people that he disagreed with everything that they held dear.
That's a beautiful thing.
It shows you a good way forward because the Republicans who showed up to this thing got flack, rightly so, because the Republicans who showed up to this thing broadly seem on board with the World Economic Forum Great Reset type agenda.
But the reason they were criticized for that is because we had these people's numbers before they showed up to Davos.
If Donald Trump showed up to Davos, I think we know he's not going there to kiss the ring of Klaus Schwab.
If Lauren Boebert showed up to Davos to give a speech, if she were ever invited, I sort of doubt that someone that right wing would be invited.
But if she were, we would know that she's going there to stick a finger in the eye.
The question we've got to ask about this is...
Is not, are you willing to engage in this culture?
I think it'd be great.
I want Trump to show up every year.
I want him to just stick a finger in their eye every single year.
I think that would be wonderful.
I'm not saying we totally disengage from the libs.
Frankly, I think that kind of attitude is what's got us in this mess in the first place.
We abandon the universities.
We abandon Hollywood.
We abandon the political realm because we convinced ourselves that wielding political power was wrong per se.
And what did that do?
That just gave the libs the stage.
No, don't give them the stage.
Show up and tell them what you think.
And bring them into line.
That's fine by me.
You just got to know where they stand and who they stand for.
Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, Democrat governor of Michigan, was at the World Economic Forum today.
Why was she here?
Was she here to represent the interests of the American people?
Was she here to represent her constituents?
No, of course not.
She was here to play along with the bidding of the Davos set.
Know who the people are standing for.
If you can read clearly what they stand for, Then send them out.
Send them out to engage in the world.
There's nothing wrong with that.
We just have to win.
Welcome back to my favorite time of the week.
The Voice Mailbag brought to you by Pure Talk.
Go to puretalk.com right now.
Select a plan.
Enter code Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, to get 50% off your first month.
Take it away with the first question.
Hey, Michael.
In today's world, is it possible to separate someone from being conservative and being a Republican?
With the number of squish Republicans growing, when is it time that true conservatives cut ties and create a party that actually stands on true conservative foundation and will actually stand by that?
Thanks.
We will never purge the squishes from the Republican Party.
That is not possible because there are not enough hardcore conservatives.
And there are many, many squishes.
And there are many, many libs.
So you do have to figure out a way to get the squishes to work with you and to vote for your sorts of candidates.
The problem is not that there are squishes who vote for Republican candidates.
The problem is that the Republican politicians cater to the squishes over the conservatives.
And so what we have to do...
Let's figure out a way for the conservatives, not to leave the alliance that we've made with the squishes, but to lead the alliance that we've made with the squishes.
We need to craft the political conditions, and this is an art, politics is an art, such that the squishes will go along with what we conservatives want them to go along with, And that the squishes will not be tempted to defect for the liberals.
And that requires a little bit of massage.
It's why you've got to be wise as a dove and innocent as a serpent.
And you can't actually affect political progress and change and all the buzzwords that we want to affect.
You can't do good in the political realm if you are...
Going to let the perfect get in the way of the good.
We've just got to figure out a way to be a little gutsier because as long as the conservatives remain the junior partner in this alliance that we've made with the squishes, then we might as well vote for Democrats half the time.
Okay, next question.
Hey, Michael.
This is Jake.
I've noticed there's a trend that seems to be maligning millennials for not growing up.
And I think that the boomers, who are my parents as a millennial...
Don't receive this criticism when they absolutely should.
I don't think that they have ever got out of a materialistic, hedonistic mindset they had since they were children.
And I think that extrapolates into the fact that they run from being patriarchs and matriarchs of a family.
They cut bait, abandon their children and their grandchildren for retirement homes in Florida and hoarding wealth.
They have 65% of the wealth in the country.
They had 20% when they were my age.
And my generation, millennials, have 4% of the wealth.
So I don't think that we should stop at criticizing millennials for not growing up.
Fair enough.
Very good point.
And yes, as a matter of fact, the Boomers deserve all the criticism that they get as a generation.
However, Millennials, and I guess some of the older Zoomers, should not be the ones to criticize them.
And the reason for that is they are our parents.
And that's wrong.
You have to honor your father and mother.
I'm not saying that the criticism of the Boomers is not warranted.
I was talking to Drew.
My very good friend, who happens to be a boomer, he said, Michael, we ruined everything.
It was all the boomers' fault.
Everything they say about us is true.
And we know that.
And yet it is still wrong for millennials, as a rule, to whine about the boomers.
Because there are parents, and we should say thank you.
Thank you, boomers, boomer parents, for giving us the things you gave us.
Thank you for doing your best.
We appreciate the gift of life you gave us.
We're going to honor our mothers and fathers.
And we can learn from the boomers and not make some of the mistakes that they did.
Hey Michael, huge fan of the show.
I wanted to ask you a question related to the medical world and what your opinion is on it.
So in Star Trek Voyager, there's an episode where a patient who is dying on the medical bed was offered treatment to save him.
However, the doctor who was performing the operation was a doctor who performed research on the patient's species of people and almost entirely killed them all from these experiments.
Obviously, the patient refused treatment on the grounds that he didn't want Well, I'm glad that you know my answer.
I'm not sure that I know my answer.
So I'd like you to inform me of my answer.
Because I would just need to know much more.
I would need to know...
If the Mengele type of doctor had had a change of heart, had he repented, had he regretted what he had done and then gone ahead and changed his ways, could I trust that he was going to give me decent medical care?
If I could trust that, then I wouldn't refuse the life-saving medical care just because of some sins he had committed in the past.
I wouldn't cut off my nose to spite my face.
That would be crazy.
Now, if I thought that he was just going to experiment on me and rip my guts out and do all sorts of experiments on them, then I'd say, no, I probably would refuse the care because it wouldn't be care.
It would be just further abuse.
It also depends, do I have a terminal illness?
Do I have a kind of disease that would require extraordinary, extraordinary measures to keep me alive?
Would I be very, very aged and frail at this point?
Would I be nearing natural death anyway?
Would the care be ordinary kind of medical care or extraordinary kind of medical care?
What would it be?
Because if it were ordinary medical care and it were a normal course of events, I think I would probably have an obligation to accept it.
Because of the law of self-preservation, which is part of the natural law.
So I don't know.
And I've never seen Star Trek, so I really don't know.
Next question.
Hi, Michael.
My name's RJ, long-time listener.
I was with my friends when the issue of whether or not God exists came up.
I said he did, and they agreed somewhat, but they said there was no way to be sure.
I gave what was essentially C.S. Lewis's argument for the Tao, that, you know, that there is such a thing as an objective good and bad, and there's universal truth within all of us.
They rejected this, and said that there is no universal morality.
And they used slavery as an example.
Not the fact that it existed and still exists, but that there were many who genuinely did not believe they were doing anything wrong.
I've struggled with this, as the Taoist C.S. Lewis describes it would mean that no one, or at least the vast majority of people, could participate in something such as slavery without seeing it as objectively evil.
The argument for universal truth and against moral relativism is what brought me back to Christianity after several years of waning belief.
Please clear this seeming contradiction as it would vastly improve my state of mind.
The Daily Wire, and of course C.S. Lewis, have been instrumental in guiding my faith, and though you've yet to convert me to Catholicism, given more time, I have no doubt you'll get me there.
Thanks, Michael.
I greatly appreciate it.
I'm very pleased to hear all of that.
That's absolutely wonderful.
So, wow, that's all really great.
Well, since you're basically begging me to convert you to Catholicism, I would quote the First Vatican Council.
Not the Second Vatican Council, but the First Vatican Council, which states that the existence of God can be known with certainty by the light of human reason from the natural world.
Okay, so I know that today many modern people want to say, well, we can never really know if God exists or not, and it's just a pure leap of faith, man.
But that is not true.
We can know for certain that God exists.
There are many good arguments as to why God exists.
You name one of those arguments, which is that we know that some things are better than other things.
We know...
That there are objective realities.
There is objective goodness.
If anything is better than any other thing, then there has to be a maximally great thing, the sumum bonum, to use, I don't know, is that Spanish or something?
I don't know.
That's some kind of old language.
If anything is true or false, then there has to be an objective reality that underlies the whole world.
If things are in motion, we know that in our universe things are in motion, then there has to be some way that they got to be in motion.
If things are caused in this world, and if we see the effects of those causes, then there has to be a first cause.
There has to be an uncaused cause.
There are many other arguments.
You can go through the five arguments for the existence of God of St.
Thomas Aquinas.
There are many other good arguments.
I love the ontological argument for God.
That's not the most popular one.
The fact that God is by definition the maximally great being, and it's better to exist than not to exist.
Therefore, God by definition must exist.
It's a charming argument.
It doesn't convince a lot of people.
I think it did convince C.S. Lewis.
So anyway, those are all good arguments.
And so if your friend's objection is that some people disagree over certain aspects of morality, I don't deny that, but I don't think that undermines Lewis's understanding of the Tao either.
That doesn't undermine the fact that human beings are born with a moral conscience and we can know that certain things are right and wrong simply by Reason because they're a part of the natural law.
That doesn't undermine that.
It is, in fact, the case that, one, certain people are just so eccentric or so depraved that their reason and conscience is defective.
That happens in the world.
You know, this is a fallen world, and so we need education to fix those rare occasions.
It's also the case that certain instantiations of moral laws can look different in different places.
So we recognize that it is wrong to commit murder.
But different jurisdictions will have different laws on killing.
Killing by the state, killing as a matter of retribution, killing in times of war.
And so you can see different instantiations of that, and reasonable minds can disagree over those things.
But that wouldn't contradict the natural law.
Much more to say on this topic, but we're running out of time, and I want to get to at least one mailbag question.
Okay, this mailbag question is from John.
It is on...
The topic of pornography.
Okay.
And we don't have a mailbag segment, or rather a member block segment today because I'm on the road.
So I'm just going to go along and I'm going to do it anyway because I want to at least get to one written mailbag.
And this is one people send in porn questions all the time.
Hello, Michael.
Many young single guys like me have struggles with porn.
I would also like to get married and have a family someday, but I feel like my addiction is an obstacle to that.
I don't feel like it's very fair to subject a future wife to my problem, as I know how painful it is for women whose husbands watch porn.
What do you think is the best approach?
You often make the point that it's a fallen world, which is true, but should my fallenness discourage me from getting married?
Thanks, John.
No, it shouldn't discourage you from getting married.
It should encourage you to practice virtue and to repent of your sins and to do so realistically.
Okay, you point out here, and I point it out on the show all the time, guys write into me constantly about porn.
I talk to priests.
Priests tell me that 90% plus of the guys who show up into the confessional are confessing looking at porn at some point.
It's ubiquitous.
It's everywhere.
And it's not entirely your fault.
You live in a culture that promotes porn where we've all got these little portals to hell in our pockets and we've got computers everywhere.
And even just ordinary billboards and TV shows have a lot of pornographic content.
So go easy on yourself.
But don't relax your view of morality because your moral intuition is right and you're recognizing that it's destroying your life.
So treat it like any other addiction.
You call it an addiction.
Treat it like any other addiction.
And just try to go one day without looking at it.
If you're looking at porn every single day, just try to go one day without looking at porn.
This is what you'd tell an alcoholic.
Some guy's drinking all the time every single day.
Say, try to go one day without a drink.
Try to go one day without looking at porn.
You're not saying I'm going to go my whole life and you're going to get the shakes like you're a drug addict.
Just say you're going to go one day.
If you're looking at porn, I don't know, let's say you're looking at porn three times a week.
Say, okay, I'm going to try not to look at porn at all, but if I do, I'm only going to look at it one time a week.
And then you do that for a little bit.
Maybe you backslide, people backslide.
But then after a while, say, okay, maybe if you reduced it to two times a week, reduce it to one time.
If you reduced it to one time, reduce it to no times.
You can grow in these things.
The devil's trick is to convince you that you can never improve because he's going to make you a slave to your lusts.
But habits are such that because...
Because virtue is a habit, the more you practice virtue, the easier it's going to be.
Vice is a habit, and so the more you engage in a vice, the harder it's going to be to pull away from that vice.
And so time is your friend here, okay?
And if you just keep it up day by day at a time, and I would recommend sacramental confession.
I know that some people don't buy into sacramental confession.
I think it spiritually is very effective.
And even if you don't buy that, psychologically it's very effective to get on your knees and confess your sins to God in the presence of a man who you believe has the power to forgive sins and cleanse your soul.
I happen to believe that those graces actually work.
They have a real effect on your soul.
But psychologically, at least, even if you're a hardcore atheist, I think you can understand why that would work and why that kind of accountability would work and why that reassurance that, okay, son, your sins are forgiven.
It's a fallen world.
Don't worry.
Don't let your sins bury you.
Don't let your bad habits bury you.
You can improve.
So take it seriously.
But do so in the light of grace.
That's the only way that you're going to overcome it.
