Ep. 1173 - Democrats Team Up With Republicans To Spend All Your Money
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Republicans promise not to touch social security or Medicare, Trump attacks DeSantis as a “globalist,” and Minnesota adopts the abortion policies of communist China and North Korea.
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has just announced that in the upcoming spending fight, any and all spending cuts to Social Security and Medicare are, quote, completely off the table.
Now, this promise poses a problem, since 46% of federal spending comes from Social Security, Medicare, and related programs.
Which means that if no one wants to touch those entitlements...
The federal government would have to reduce 85% of all other spending, military, education, energy, servicing the debt, all of it, in order to deal with the deficit, which is to say it becomes impossible.
Republicans used to pull their hair out over this issue of entitlement reform some 20 years ago, back when the debt-to-GDP ratio was less than 60%.
We came pretty close to actually reforming entitlements a dozen or so years ago when debt to GDP was about 90%.
But now we've got a debt that is 123% of GDP. In other words...
We are just not going to pay it back or ever meaningfully pay it down.
Especially since we accumulated all that debt back when interest rates were around zero before they shot up in recent months, making debt much more expensive to service and pay off.
But it doesn't really matter because the U.S. is the top dog around the world.
So as long as we remain dominant and our dollar remains trustworthy, the U.S. can keep on spending money we don't have with pretty much no consequences.
We are in a new phase of our nation's history.
And everybody knows it.
And nobody is even pretending otherwise anymore.
Not even the Republicans.
Not even the conservatives.
We no longer need to worry as much about how to pay off tens of trillions of dollars of debt.
But we've only traded that problem for a tougher one.
How do we remain the world's most powerful empire forever?
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Walter Sobchak, who says, I have to click two agreements to watch some Wonder Mike spit some sick truths to my ears.
Thank goodness I can just watch WAP without any warning because of its pure wholesomeness.
This is pretty weird yesterday.
A number of you called my attention to it.
There was not one, but actually there were two warnings that you had to click on before you could watch my episode.
My episode on...
I don't know.
I don't know.
My episode on Pfizer, maybe that was what triggered it.
I don't know.
It's kind of weird, though.
You can go watch any manner of smut, porn, violent videos, bizarre lies.
You can watch that on YouTube, no problem.
But you want to watch The Michael Knowles Show.
I don't know.
You're not allowed to do that.
That's too bad.
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Good news is we don't even need to pretend to care about paying down our debt and dealing with our deficits anymore.
Bad news is we need to remain the dominant empire or else it's all going to collapse.
You only don't need to worry about your debt when you're the top dog.
When you're not the top dog, though, then consequences can come quite suddenly.
Very, very gradually over time and then quite suddenly.
So the question is, who's going to run the empire?
That's what a lot of people are asking right now.
Donald Trump wants to run the empire.
Joe Biden wants to run the empire.
And increasingly, it would appear that Ron DeSantis wants to run the empire.
DeSantis is doing a great job in Florida.
He's got a book coming out, one of these politician-like books that sets the stage for a presidential campaign.
He's got a ton of support.
He's surging in the polls all over the country.
President Trump does not like this.
President Trump says that Ron DeSantis is a globalist.
He's specifically referring to the Club for Growth here, and he's attacking the Club for Growth, and he's attacking Ron DeSantis, and he's attacking the candidates associated with both these guys.
He says, the Club for Growth is a globalist group that I've been taking to the cleaners for years.
We worked together for a period, but they couldn't get away from China, Europe, Asia, and parts unknown.
They know I won't play that game.
I am America first all the way.
That's the only way we will make America great again.
Ron DeSantis, who I made governor in both the primary and the general, is also a globalist, and so are his donors.
Jeb Low Energy Bush was next to him last week.
Check passed.
So now you can tell there's a little bit of a logical issue in this attack on Ron DeSantis, which is, he says, Ron DeSantis, who I made governor, who I got through both the primary and the general, is a globalist.
So you say, well, if he's...
If he's a good governor, then you should take credit for him.
If he's a bad governor and is a globalist, you probably don't want to take credit for him.
But it doesn't matter.
Trump is throwing the kitchen sink at Ron DeSantis.
And I think it's a smart move.
I know that a lot of Republicans are very upset.
Certainly people who are already signed up on the DeSantis train, they're very upset at Trump for this.
Even a lot of Trump supporters say, why, man, come on, the race isn't for, or the election, rather, isn't for another couple of years, almost two years.
Why are you going after DeSantis?
He's one of the most popular Republicans in the country.
He has to go after DeSantis, because DeSantis has a lot of momentum on his side.
And he's gaining a lot of support.
And so if Trump wants to beat DeSantis, he's got to attack DeSantis.
Do I think that this is the most persuasive attack I've ever read in my life?
No, not exactly.
I don't think that this is changing a whole lot of minds on Ron DeSantis.
But it's the opening salvo.
In what Trump is preparing to be a long primary campaign against Ron DeSantis.
Now, what even some people who like Trump are saying is this is a bad strategy because you're attacking Ron DeSantis on an area where he is very strong and you are very weak.
Stop going after Ron DeSantis.
Specifically, you don't even see it too much in this particular attack, but you've seen it more broadly in Trump's salvos against Ron DeSantis.
He'll say, well, DeSantis shut down Florida.
DeSantis wasn't that great on COVID. DeSantis wasn't...
He's not all the things he says that he is.
And they're saying, this is really dumb.
You should attack DeSantis where he's weak, not where he's strong.
DeSantis is really strong on COVID. Trump is relatively weaker on COVID. Why would...
This is not just craziness, okay?
This is not just Trump shooting from the hip and following a gut impulse that's wrong.
There is a good argument for this strategy.
This is the Karl Rove strategy.
So, most people just intuitively believe you should attack your opponent where they are weak, and you should not attack your opponent in an area where you yourself are weak.
Rove said, no, it's the opposite.
Attack your opponent's strengths.
You don't need to attack their weaknesses.
Their weaknesses are manifest.
Attack your opponent's strengths.
Turn your opponent's strengths into a problem for them.
This was most clearly done in 2004 when Bush was running against John Kerry.
The Iraq war was a big issue in the 2004 race.
John Kerry was a military veteran, a decorated one, even though John Kerry's behavior after the war was shameful.
And George Bush did not really have all that much military service.
So the common sense said, don't attack John Kerry on the military.
But that's what the Republicans did.
Specifically, the swift boat veterans for truth attacked Kerry, said his service was a bunch of BS. He was a grandstander, a showboater, a ribbon collector.
And it worked.
The strategy did work.
So you might hate Trump.
You might love Trump.
You might love DeSantis.
You might hate DeSantis.
I don't care.
My thought, though, is...
One, Trump's strategy makes a lot of sense.
DeSantis' strategy is very smart too.
DeSantis is just not responding to any of this.
He's going to continue to govern in Florida.
That's exactly what he should be doing.
And for the people who say, well, why do they have to attack each other?
Because this is politics.
Why does Trump have to do this?
Because this is politics.
Well, it shouldn't be like this.
Well, it is like this.
It is always like this.
This is what politics is.
If jockeying for power Annoys you rather than amuses you?
Why are you paying so much attention to politics?
Go watch baseball.
I don't know.
Although baseball can be very intense, too.
I don't know.
Go to an art gallery.
If watching ambitious men jockey to gain power and attack one another in the process drives you crazy and makes your blood boil, then stop being involved in politics.
You're not going to like it.
That's all politics is.
We like to think that those men, once they attain power, will govern in a just way for the common good and do all these higher-minded things.
But the actual process of attaining power is this.
This is it.
This is all that it is.
DeSantis is...
Doing exactly what he should be doing.
Trump is also doing exactly what he should be doing.
And we'll see how the primary process shakes out.
Speaking of political jobs, a story came out a few days ago.
We didn't have time to get to it before.
Out of the RNC, the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel was re-elected.
There was a race that came on between Ron and McDaniel, who's run the GOP for a dozen years, and Harmeet Dillon, who was a favorite of some more conservative people probably than support Ron and McDaniel.
Though it broke down, it was a little bit confusing because Trump backed McDaniel, DeSantis backed Harmeet Dillon.
So you've got conservatives in both camps.
You've got some squishes in both camps too.
McDaniel won.
As I knew would happen.
I did have some people come up to me behind the scenes, ask me what I thought.
I don't think I even maybe talked about this on the air, so I don't know that I get full Noel Stradamus credit for this prediction.
But I did predict it.
And people said, ah, Michael, we've got to back Harmeet.
We're going to throw all of our support behind Harmeet.
I said, well, you're free to do that.
I like Harmeet Dillon very much.
I said, but if you wanted me to place a bet right now, my bet is Ronna McDaniel holds on.
These people looked at me shocked.
They said, oh, what are you talking about?
All the support is for Harmeet Dillon.
I said, no, people on Twitter like Harmeet Dillon.
And I'm sure many people at the RNC privately like Harmeet Dillon too.
But Ronna McDaniel will hold on to power.
If you're surprised by the re-election of Ronna McDaniel, 111 votes to Harmeet's 53, and then Mike Lindell got 4 votes.
If you're surprised by that, you haven't been paying terribly close attention to the Republican Party.
The way that the party committees work, the way that elections work broadly, does not correspond often, if ever at all, to what people in certain political bubbles are talking about on Twitter.
That's not how it works.
Some people are very, very upset about this.
They say, no, we can't.
That's terrible.
Rana didn't do a good job.
Now she's still running things.
This is terrible.
I don't really care who runs the RNC. I like Rana.
I like Harmeet.
I like Mike Lindell, for that matter.
I don't really care all that much.
It's not a great job to have.
It involves a lot of really granular kinds of decisions.
And most importantly of all, any significant improvement to the Republican Party or to U.S. politics is going to come from outside of the party committee.
I'm not looking to the RNC to solve our political problems.
That's not what the committee was built for.
That's not what the committee does.
I don't think that's what the committee can do.
Donald Trump didn't win in 2016 by convincing the RNC to support him.
Donald Trump engaged in a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.
And then the RNC sort of got on board.
So, okay, whoever runs the committee, fine, whatever.
The real significant improvement, it ain't coming from some party committee in Washington, D.C., Speaking of employment, a Google executive was fired for not being inclusive enough.
Because this Google executive, you see, he engaged in a terrible crime.
He favored good employees over underperforming employees.
His Google exec was fairly high ranking.
He was allegedly sexually harassed by his boss.
And then fired for failing to be inclusive, according to a lawsuit filed in New York federal court.
He fired Ryan Olehan as managing director of food, beverage, and restaurants, telling him it was because he was not inclusive enough.
What did he do?
Google's employee investigations team explained that this guy had shown favoritism toward high performers, which it considered non-inclusive, and commented on employees' walking pace and hustle.
Which it considered ableist.
If you've ever worked in a restaurant, I've worked in restaurants.
You know, it's a kind of intense environment, especially if you're working in the kitchen.
But waiters, too.
You've got to move.
You've got to move fast.
So if you say, hey, move quickly.
Let's go.
Put a little hop in your step.
That's very ableist.
And the real issue was...
Apparently, this guy didn't discriminate against white people enough.
In February of 2022, Adam Stewart, who's VP of Google's Consumer Government and Entertainment Division, told Olehan that there were, quote, Stewart and the company's HR department, quote, encouraged Olehan to terminate the employment of a male member of his team and replace him with a female hire because it wasn't inclusive enough.
Unless you fire the white guys and unless you discriminate against white people and against men, you're not being inclusive enough.
And why?
Why is this?
Olihan says he's just picking the best people for the job.
He doesn't care about race.
He doesn't care about sex.
He's just hiring the best people for the job.
And he's favoring high performers and promoting them.
Google says, yeah, maybe you are, but that's a problem.
If the argument is that non-whites cannot compete on merit, then the only solution is conscious, active discrimination against whites.
If the argument is that women can't compete with men on the merit in these jobs, then the only solution is active discrimination against men.
That is the only solution.
You see this in major lawsuits right now that will determine the fate of affirmative action, quote-unquote, in college.
What's affirmative action in college?
It's saying that students of certain racial backgrounds cannot compete against students of other racial backgrounds on the merit.
And so you've got to actively discriminate against the students of the more successful racial backgrounds.
What does this mean in practice?
You know the lawsuit never would have gone anywhere if this were simply about discriminating against white people.
You're not allowed to complain about that.
You're not allowed to object to that at all in our culture.
The reason that it's gone anywhere with the universities is because Asians got lumped in with the white people too.
That was one of the real flaws of the affirmative action regime.
If they had just limited it to white people, it wouldn't matter.
It is legal and culturally accepted and frankly culturally encouraged to attack white people and slander white people and discriminate against them in our culture.
The mistake they made was lumping in Asians.
And so the lawsuits in this regard have said, wait a second, why are you discriminating against Asians?
In many cases who come from difficult backgrounds, immigrants, don't have a lot of money, didn't have a lot of opportunities.
Why are you docking their points on the SAT or why are you docking their points in the overall metric to admit students to college?
And then giving an artificial boost to black and Hispanic students.
Thank you.
Why on earth would you do that?
And no one can really give an answer.
But it has to be that way.
This is the logic of it.
Either people are going to compete on the merit...
Or you are going to actively discriminate against people.
And it's interesting that this lawsuit is coming up right now as the Supreme Court.
We are waiting for them to strike down affirmative action or to uphold affirmative action.
That is going to have a lot to say.
Not just about this case of a Google executive who was not inclusive enough because he was not exclusive enough.
He was not inclusive enough because he didn't fire enough white guys.
It's not only going to have something to say about the fate of that case.
It's going to have something to say about the future of the country.
Do we have a caste system or not?
Do we have favored groups or not?
And therefore, disfavored groups or not?
Speaking of the job market, Maryland lawmakers are proposing increasing the weekend by 50%.
That's right.
They're proposing a four-day workweek.
This legislation would provide state tax credits as high as three-quarters of a million dollars per year for businesses that reduce at least 30 employees from a 40-hour workweek to a 32-hour workweek without a reduction in pay or benefits.
Now, of course, the businesses might be able to do this in the short term because they're just getting the pay and benefits from the government and then they can just pass that along.
Why do people want a four-day workweek?
Well, one, because we all want to just sit on the couch an extra day.
That sounds very pleasant.
Or even spend more time with our families or catch up on reading or fix up the house.
But the argument from the business side is that the four-day workweek framework We're good to go.
Concluded that revenues increased 8% for companies involved with the experiment.
So they reduced the workweek by one day.
Revenue increases by 8%.
Now, this is just one study.
Perhaps there will be others to back this up.
But I can totally...
Empathize.
Not only sympathize, but empathize with the workers who say, look, I don't have enough flexibility.
I'm not seeing my kids enough.
This is really tough, especially now that we have an economy where both parents are expected to work.
It's very, very difficult in this economy to raise a family on a single income.
So daddy's got to go work.
Mommy's got to go work.
And then who's taking care of the kids?
Then you've got to try to arrange, maybe I can get an extra half day off here every so often.
But really what you've got to do is just take all the money we're making at the widget factory and go pay some other woman to raise our kids.
We don't really want to do that.
Can we go on vacation?
Do we have any flexibility at all?
So the Maryland lawmakers are proposing this radical idea of the four-day workweek.
I have a more radical idea.
I know you're going to hear the arch-capitalist, libertarian-type people who say, no, we shouldn't reduce the work week at all.
We should work seven days a week, and we should let the market sort it all out.
No, I'm not arguing that.
I'm all for reducing the work week for some people.
What if, follow me here, we reduce the work week of mothers...
What if we reduce it down to like nothing?
Down from five days, not just four days, maybe to like zero to one days.
And then we balance that.
I know we're going to need balance in the economy.
We balance that out by having the fathers and the husbands work even harder So you've got a situation where you've got the moms can stay home and raise the kids, and you reduce the number of people in the labor force, because now you're removing up to half of the labor force.
And so therefore the wages are going to increase for the other half that remains in the labor force.
And in so doing, you're much more likely to have a country in which a family can support itself on a single income.
And then the children get to see mommy, and they don't just need mommy to go work for some Mr.
McGillicuddy at the widget factory so that mommy can put her money into a bank account and then daddy can pay some other woman to raise the kids.
What if then, what if you actually had in that case...
A complementarity between the roles in the family.
And you had the children spending time with their mothers and the father going out and bringing home the bacon.
Wouldn't that be so radical and weird?
That's such a crazy idea.
Maybe I'll call up the Maryland lawmakers, because they're on to something here.
All these people doing all these studies in the lab coats, they're on to something here.
But maybe our answer is, maybe we've got more evidence for this than even for the four-day work week, because this is the way the world worked until very, very recently.
Really until the World War.
So the Second World War, when the men were all overseas, women started to enter into the labor force.
And then companies really enjoyed women entering the labor force, because contrary to the gender pay gap or whatever nonsense you hear about that, the companies love to hire women, because the more people you have in the labor force, the more it drives down the cost of labor.
And this has been a big boon to GDP.
This has been a big boon to corporations.
This has been disastrous, though, for the American family, which is why workers are complaining about all these problems right now.
But you can fix these problems.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel.
You can go back to a more traditional way of living.
Speaking of men and women, Dylan Mulvaney.
I covered Dylan Mulvaney, not on this show exactly, but I did a long video that ended up going pretty viral on YouTube.
About who Dylan Mulvaney is, how this obscure Broadway performer ended up pretending to become a woman and then sitting down interviewing the President of the United States in a very short period of time.
And I gave my take on Mulvaney that he's not just a troll, he's not just making fun of transgenderism, even though he's prancing around and performing this ridiculous caricature of a woman.
Saying, you know, it's my first day as a woman.
I've cried three times today.
Oh, which is frankly somewhat accurate.
Part of his performance is quite a caricature, but women do cry a lot.
Okay.
And it's just in my experience, I've known many women in my life, but a lot of his performance is an over-the-top caricature.
And so some people thought, oh, he's just a troll.
He's just making fun of the whole thing.
No, I don't.
My argument was that this is an actor who's been trained in the modern style of acting, who is indulging the worst And most dangerous impulses of that style of acting, which actually goes back even before the group theater, even before the Strasburg Method, it goes back to the Russian Moscow Art Theater director Stanislavski, and it goes back to Freud.
So it has ripple effects in our culture far beyond the theater.
And it would seem that I am right, because Dylan Mulvaney has undergone a facial feminization surgery to carve up his face to make him look marginally more like a woman.
So, Dylan Mulvaney comes out in this bizarre kind of ballet costume.
Not looking much more like a woman.
His face looks a bit like Caitlyn Jenner, because I assume...
Sorry, Bruce Jenner, after he revealed himself as Caitlyn.
Because I assume they all follow the same guidelines.
But he doesn't...
He doesn't look like...
That's a wrap on face reveal!
Oh my gosh, hi!
I missed you!
You know I have a flair for the dramatics.
But it's so good, right?
I'm so happy and it's still me, it's just a little bit softer of a version.
And I just hope that all trans and non-binary people can get the gender-affirming resources that they need because this is life-changing and sometimes life-saving.
So thank you so much for supporting me And we've got so much to catch up on.
I love ya!
This was Dylan Mulvaney's face reveal.
In a sane and healthy culture, Dylan Mulvaney's reveal would have been him in a straight jacket in a padded cell receiving the psychological help that he needs.
The reveal would be that this guy is going to go away for a little while.
He's going to get some help.
Then maybe he'll come back when he realizes he's not a woman.
But our society is no longer sane or healthy, really, in any way.
So the society now celebrates this delusion.
Whatever it is, he's not faking it.
People don't get the bones in their face chopped up because they're faking it.
People don't get other things chopped off.
I don't know if he's done that yet or not.
Don't really want to know either.
They don't do that because they're faking it.
This is a real delusion, and it goes a lot deeper than Just some people following some deviant desires.
This is exploding as a phenomenon.
It is a social contagion.
It might be because they're turning the frickin' frogs gay with chemicals in the water.
More likely, though, I think it's a social phenomenon.
And it's because all the rest of us are indulging it with a straight face.
If we as a society just said, nope, this is nuts, you have no right to do any of this, you have no right to call yourself a woman, if you do, if you refer to yourself as she and her, we are going to...
We're going to ostracize you for that.
There will be consequences in your professional and educational life, and we're just not going to tolerate that at all.
If we were a little less live and let live, man, then Dylan Mulvaney would live a much better life.
Because the consequences of our live and let live, who knows, man, maybe your good is my bad, maybe your yuck is my yum, maybe your man is my woman, you know what I'm saying, man?
The consequences of that radical skepticism are now that this man is chopping up his face and engaging even more destructive behavior that is not going to end well.
Speaking of transgenderism, major big first, really, really big first.
The first openly transgender figure skater has just appeared at the European figure skating championships in Espoo, Finland.
This is Minna Maria Antikainen, a Finnish skater who's an older man, dressed up as a woman, skating around, not...
Not the most gracefully, but he's sort of skating and then he falls down.
And then he falls on the ice and he can't stand up.
And so then the Finnish people with the flag come out and try to help him stand up.
And then, and the craziest part of this whole display is that we're not allowed to acknowledge it.
I mean, on this show we do.
But in the culture, you're not, if you're sitting there in that audience, you can't hear it on any of the clips that I've seen, and I'm sure you couldn't hear it in the audience.
You're not allowed to say, oh, this is weird, this is funny, this is obviously absurd.
No, we all have to just sit there and pretend, oh, yes, she's so beautiful.
These poor little girls who are on the track teams with all the confused men are on the Penn swimming team with that hulk of a man who took all their trophies.
And then what do the girls have to do?
On camera, they have to smile, they have to plaster a smile, and they say, this is really great!
She is so beautiful!
We love being on her team!
And then privately, of course, when they're speaking to journalists and they can remain anonymous, they say, this is terrible.
We don't want some guy getting naked in our locker room and taking our trophies and taking our scholarships, and this is deeply unjust.
But then when the cameras come out, they say, ah, you are beautiful, Caitlin and Dylan.
I don't know what Dylan's new lady name is going to be.
I guess Dylan's kind of androgynous.
You are beautiful, Mina Maria.
You're the greatest skater I've ever seen.
You're a regular Tonya Harding.
In totalitarian countries, one of the things that we marvel at is that the people are forced to perform lies all the time.
When Kim Jong-il died, and you had major parades all throughout North Korea to honor the death of the great leader...
You saw those cameras in all these North Koreans.
Perhaps some were moved seriously by sympathy.
I kind of doubt a lot of it, though.
For many of them, they were performing it because there were guns pointed at them.
They knew that if they didn't cry enough over the death of dear leader, they could be tortured.
They could be killed.
Their family could be killed.
Everybody has to lie.
This is true in Stalin's Russia, in the Soviet Union.
This is true in China.
And this is now true...
In the West.
We are forced to lie, too, because our government is increasingly totalitarian.
It's a total state.
It comprises everything.
If you, in your HR meeting, don't affirm that some hulking, hairy dude wearing a dress in stilettos with lipstick smeared on his face is actually a beautiful woman, you could be fired, and you probably will be fired.
And once you're fired for that, you're going to have a hard time getting more employment.
And you're going to be a pariah in your society.
It's terrible when North Korea does that.
The good thing we live in America, the land of the free and the home of totalitarian delusion.
Every day, more and more so.
But love is love, right?
Love is love.
You do you.
Trans women are women.
Everybody's whatever they want to be.
If love is love, then I've got a question about a story that just came out.
A story out of ABC News.
A couple of hosts for Good Morning America 3 were just fired because they had an affair.
Amy Robach and TJ Holmes.
I've never watched this show.
I didn't know there was such a thing as Good Morning America 3.
But they were hosts of it, and they just got fired because they were both married.
And then they had a consensual affair, and then this came to light.
And it's not as though one person accused the other of sexual harassment or anything like that.
They were both married, but they had a consensual affair, and now they're canned.
Why is that wrong?
I know why it's wrong.
Because marriage is an indissoluble bond between a husband and a wife.
I know that it's wrong because spouses take a vow before God and before the political community to remain with one another through thick and thin, good times and bad, sickness and health.
And that's wrong.
That's not what the modern culture believes.
The modern culture believes that marriage is nothing but a kind of meaningless sheet of paper, and we can leave our spouses for whatever reason we want, and that's called a no-fault divorce.
And there's nothing wrong with polyamory, polygamy, whatever.
There's nothing wrong with any of these arrangements.
Love is love.
Love is love.
That's the whole argument for redefining marriage, is that the affection between two men and the affection between two women is the same as marriage, the affection and then institution that that desire leads toward in the institution of marriage.
It's all the same.
Okay, well if love is love, if all shades of love and affection are exactly the same, why don't they get to have their, it was consensual.
Yeah, it wasn't so nice to their spouses, but so what?
We don't really give much credence to marriage vows anymore.
Why is this wrong?
Because if we know that this is wrong, then what we're really saying is that T.J. Holmes and Amy Roebuck should have repressed their romantic desire for each other.
They should have denied the love that they felt for one another.
They should have pushed it way, way deep down because they had other obligations, because the moral order demanded more of them than that they follow their love for one another to its physical conclusion.
But if that's the case, then why?
And isn't that just the case?
And isn't that just how it is?
And shouldn't we apply that to all sorts of other manner of love as well?
No.
A little bit confusing.
Love is love, except for Amy Robach and TJ Holmes.
They don't get to have their love.
But all sorts of other people, all sorts of weird polyamorous people with three guys and two women and a billy goat.
That's fine.
That's love.
That's wonderful.
How dare you judge that?
But Amy Robach and TJ Holmes get fired for a consensual affair.
That's really weird.
It's also really weird because Amy Robach, I actually had forgotten this until producer Danny reminded me of this today.
Amy Robach, you may have heard of her because she was caught on a hidden mic.
discussing how she wanted to pursue the Jeffrey Epstein story at ABC, and the producers and the executives shut her down.
And she knew that Jeffrey Epstein was a real story, and she knew that this involved a lot of corruption.
She wanted to run the story, and the higher-ups at the network said, nope, don't talk about that.
So that adds another layer to this, where I think, huh, it's so weird how people who transgress the Powerful liberal elites.
People who contradict them or who get on the wrong side of them.
They end up in a sex scandal and their career goes away and then they bury them.
Not all that long after they raise these problems.
Really weird.
Obviously what they did is terribly wrong and they should repent of it and go to confession and try to make up with their spouses and try to keep their families together.
There's a lot more to this story though.
It seems like there's a lot more to this story.
Both as a cultural matter and even as a particular political matter.
With regard to Mr.
Epstein, who may or probably did not kill himself, then meets the eye.
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Today is Tuesday.
Today is Taking Your Calls Tuesday.
That is my new favorite segment because we have finally gotten technology from the 1970s at The Daily Wire, and I can take your calls right now.
So, let's turn to Luca in North Carolina.
Luca, you are on the air.
Hi, Michael.
So I'm in college and I'm taking this really great class called How to Rule the World with this one in a million, young, genius, very conservative professor.
And we read Xenophon's account of Cyrus's life.
And on all accounts, I think Cyrus was a very good leader, except for some things near the end of his reign.
But my question is for you, the desire to rule the world, that ambitious drive that a lot of people and like necessarily leaders have.
Do you think that that's like a fundamentally unchristian desire?
No, I don't think that it's necessarily an unchristian desire.
I think it can be a perfectly Christian desire within its just limits.
As with all government, there's a good version and a bad version.
So I mentioned this on the show yesterday, Polybius' theory of anticyclosis, the cycle of regimes, that you have three good versions of government, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.
And then you've got their corrupted bad versions, which is tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule, respectively.
The difference is that the good versions of government are versions in which the rulers rule for the common good.
So you can have a monarch who rules for the common good.
There have been plenty of good monarchs throughout history.
You can have an aristocracy that rules for the common good.
And you can have democracies that rule for the common good.
But in the corrupted versions, the rulers, be they a single individual, a group of people, or the people at large, are the ones who rule not for the common good, but for their own selfish interests.
So, you know, you think of this in the American context, that warning that the republic is going to collapse when people realize that they can bribe We need government.
Government is given to us by God for our own good.
We need government to execute justice and to preserve law, order, and peace, which are good things.
And the civil authority has ultimately the sword to execute punishment, even capital punishment.
This is a fallen world.
The prince of this world is the devil.
So we don't want to think that we can save ourselves and create a kind of paradise on earth through civil government.
That is not going to happen.
And if that is the impulse to take over the world, then that's not very good.
But if we want to rule the world and thereby maintain some degree of peace and justice and allow people to flourish, then that can be a wonderful thing.
I know that this is going to sound a little jarring to people who have been raised on the kind of conservative mottos that Government is always bad, and no government is best, and we should never pursue politics whatsoever.
All the shallow, libertarian, quasi-anarchist maxims that have become popular in the last 30 or so years.
But that's not true.
We shouldn't just focus on procedure to the exclusion of substance.
We shouldn't just focus on form to the exclusion of substance.
The question is not, is it good to wield political power or not wield political power?
The question is...
What are you wielding the political power in service of?
Really, really good question.
Let's turn to Matthew from Louisiana.
Matthew, you're on the air.
Hey, Michael.
A question about a recent post from Thomas Massey on Twitter regarding Project Veritas.
And we always kind of discuss and debate what is the public square and what should be allowed in it.
Unless Project Veritas and uncovering the idea that Pfizer may potentially be mutating viruses was somehow illegally gained, I'm curious your thoughts on using the terms of service,
if you will, on something like YouTube to potentially restrict the uploading of otherwise legal videos when that's kind of their business is uploading videos and Just your thoughts on, you know, how we may be able to challenge things and truly open up the public square for debate and discussion.
So, appreciate your thoughts.
Really good question.
I actually had my own video yesterday censored by YouTube.
So, you know, I put this show out on, it goes out on terrestrial radio all over the country, goes out on the podcast feed, goes out on Daily Wire Plus, which is where we have the most leeway of Really, we can say whatever we want.
But sometimes on YouTube in particular, and Facebook, they will censor us, they'll put warnings up.
And I had two warnings on my video yesterday.
I don't really know why I did talk about Project Veritas and Pfizer, so it might have had something to do with that.
The short answer to your question is Google and its subsidiary, YouTube, they have no right to censor this information.
They have no right as a private company, well, if you don't like it, build your own YouTube.
Nope, I don't buy that for one second.
If I don't like it, I'm going to wield my political power that I have as a citizen in a self-governing republic to stop these people from taking important matters of public interest out of the public square.
Google controls 90% of the flow of information around the internet.
If you control the public squares, particularly in a republic, you control the whole political order.
And I, as a citizen, have something to say about that.
And I want to bring the full force of the state down to stop them from doing it.
There's a further issue with Google and YouTube, which is that they are kind of arms of the government.
Yes, they're kind of private companies, but there was a lot of government money that went into building Google.
They work very, very closely with the government, and so I don't think that they're protected as some kind of private company.
I think when they violate our free speech, in many cases, that is a violation of the First Amendment.
You saw this, especially in the Twitter files, where it came to light, thanks to Elon Musk, that the FBI and the DOJ were pressuring Twitter to censor information.
Okay, now it's no longer just Twitter as a private corporation censoring information, and you have no recourse to First Amendment protections.
Now it's the government using Twitter as a proxy.
And that's very often what happens, and I suspect that's what's happening here with Google.
I say bring the full weight of the state down on them.
Let's see.
Let's turn to Kyle in North Carolina.
Hello, Kyle.
Hello.
My question is, how do you balance completely avoiding near occasions of sin and the chance to improve in your own virtue?
Great question.
Really good question.
There's a good book on this topic by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli.
It's a book that's about 500 years old called The Spiritual Combat.
And the answer is that it depends on the sin and it depends on you.
So your question is, I think the premise here is that if you want to improve in virtue, then you need to be able to look your sin in the face very often and be able to resist it.
So if you want to get over your alcohol problem, it's not enough to just throw out all the alcohol in your home.
You also need to be able to be in a restaurant where there is alcohol and not feel so tempted that you've got to go grab it.
That's true.
Of most sins.
And the way to deal with that is prudently and in such a way that, okay, maybe if you're a booze hound, you've got all the booze out of your house for now and you haven't had a drink in months.
And then now you're at a party and there's a bar on the other side of the room.
And you're not going to go near the bar, but it's all the way on the other side of the room.
And then maybe you can be in a place where there's more alcohol and more people are drinking.
And you can do that gradually and you've got to test your own limits.
There is one sin that this is not true of.
According to Dom Lorenzo Scuipoli in The Spiritual Combat, that would be the sin of lust.
That's the one where spiritual writers have written about this for many, many eons.
You just have to run.
You're not going to confront it, okay?
Only Christ can confront the Antichrist, period.
With certain sins and temptations, we can tolerate being around them a little bit more depending on your susceptibility to them.
With lust, because sex is so central to human nature, when you are finding yourself tempted by lust, you just have to run.
You have to run in the opposite direction.
So there's no world in which you get to the point where you can...
I don't know, go to a strip club or something.
Or you're going to walk around that red light district in that town you're in.
If we're not talking about that extreme, or you go to a bar on women's night at the bar and you're surrounded by these single women.
You're not going to get to a place where you're going to improve in virtue by resisting that.
You're more likely...
To destroy your life.
As Andrew Klavan points out, every man is two drinks and a wink away from destroying his own life.
So I would flee from that, fast as you can.
Okay, we got more calls that I want to get to, and then we got important stories that Mr.
Davies says I haven't covered.
We're going to do that on the member block.
If you are not a Daily Wire member, what is wrong with you?
