Ep. 1292 - Ron DeSantis Braces For The Ramaswamy Tsunami
Michael makes a world-changing announcement, a new 2024 GOP candidate jumps to second place, and Senate Democrats try to take over the Supreme Court.
Ep.1292
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A Democrat power grab to destroy the Supreme Court.
Mitt Romney's views on hot dogs.
We will get to all of it.
But first, a major announcement.
I teased this yesterday.
Today I'm prepared to give you the full story.
If you're driving, I suggest you pull over.
If you are standing up, you might want to sit down.
Six years after its initial publication, my best-selling blank book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a Comprehensive Guide, has been translated into Hungarian.
The Hungarian edition is titled: "Mert is svátsa zunk a liber nák okra, at fogó kimeritu szvátsk maj ut mutato." The book will be available in bookstores throughout Hungary as early as next Tuesday.
It is available right now for pre-order at libri.hu.
It is sadly not available on Amazon because Amazon does not operate in the nation of Hungary.
Very excited for this launch.
By the way, this is not, if you're watching right now instead of listening, this is not the real book.
The book hasn't hit bookstores yet, so I had my producers tape the cover around another book, and they did an absolutely terrible job.
So the real book will look much better than this.
I'm very excited about this launch, though.
I'm so excited that I'm gonna go to Hungary.
I'm going to go to Hungary for a full-on book tour next week to promote my blank book in its Hungarian translation.
And then at the end of the week, I'm going to give a speech at the Matthias Corvinus Collegium Fest.
That'll be next Friday.
If you're in or around Budapest, I hope to see you there.
In the three days between the publication of Mjert i Svacazunk a Libern Jakokra and my speech, I hope that my national bestseller becomes an international bestseller.
I'm relying on you to make that happen.
Because six years on, I am confident that this book's message resonates now more than ever, not just in our own country, but throughout the entire world.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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Mitt Romney has eaten a hot dog Almost as breaking news as the Hungarian translation of my blank book.
We will get to the meaning behind Mitt Romney's viral hot dog video.
Really important stuff this Friday.
You don't want to miss this kind of news.
First, though, I guess we've got to slog through some minor details about the 2024 presidential race.
Namely, there is a new number two candidate.
This doesn't mean that DeSantis is no longer number two.
It means that he's now sharing the number two spot with another candidate.
This, according to Kaplan Poll, the vague Ramaswamy.
The Ramaswamy mommies just pushing their candidate up from, where did he start?
Fifth or sixth place or something?
He was down at almost zero percent.
Now, according to this Kaplan survey, he is tied with Ron DeSantis for second place.
According to this survey, they're both tied at 12 points, and they're well behind President Trump, who is at 48%.
What does this mean?
It's still silly season.
It's a national poll.
It doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of what's going to happen in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida.
It does mean, though, that if you want to move in this race, you got to stop playing it safe.
This is a great thing.
The Vake is the only candidate in the whole race, from Trump to DeSantis to Pence to Chris Christie to Asa Hutchinson, The Vake is the only one, to Nikki Haley, to Tim Scott, there are other people in the race too, The Vake is the only one who is mixing it up and not playing it safe and putting himself in risk on the campaign trail, in positions that he's taking, in campaign stunts that he's pulling, and it's paying off.
He's the only candidate who's moving.
And even if it's just one poll, even if it just kind of looks like he's tied nationally with DeSantis, that kind of momentum, that kind of movement is a really big deal.
So yes, it's early on, but if he's getting this kind of positive movement early on, where is he going to be in two months, three months, four months?
This should be a warning sign to one candidate in particular, Ron DeSantis.
If you want to have a shot at the big job, you've got to stop playing it safe.
This is not a message to Trump.
Trump doesn't need to stop playing it safe because he's so far ahead of all the other candidates.
So for Trump, it makes sense to just not show up to the Iowa town halls, not show up too much on the campaign trail, not commit to doing the Republican debates.
Makes total sense for him.
If DeSantis keeps playing it really safe and smart and cautious, and he's got all the best consultants, and he's got, he's hearing all the best strategy advice, and here's, you gotta bide your time, he's gonna wind up like Ted Cruz.
He's gonna be a really good candidate who says many of the right things, who's scientifically precise about his campaign, down to the minutest detail, and he's gonna come in number two.
Maybe.
Maybe not even number two.
It's like I've been trying to shake the DeSantis campaign by the shoulders here.
Gotta mix it up, guys, or you're not gonna have a shot.
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By the way, there's another very serious candidate waiting in the wings.
Not even declared yet, that candidate would be Glenn Youngkin.
Remember Glenn Youngkin?
There have been two very, very impressive governors in the last couple of years.
Ron DeSantis, of course, in Florida.
Glenn Youngkin in Virginia.
Glenn Youngkin wins his race in Virginia, which is a blue commonwealth, by running, well initially he tries to run on just cutting taxes and all that business country club kind of Republican stuff and he was going nowhere.
And then, Glenn Youngkin leaned into more of the cultural issues.
Critical race theory in schools.
Transgender bathrooms in schools.
Daily Wire broke a story.
On that latter issue, and that story and that issue may have thrown the race to Glenn Youngkin.
So Youngkin's there, and inside every governor is a president just waiting to come out.
So Youngkin's looking at it.
He's reportedly meeting with some donors.
In fact, he's meeting with Trump's former Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, hosting a meet and greet for Glenn Youngkin.
Glenn Youngkin has no shortage of wealthy friends.
He was the co-CEO of the Carlyle Group.
I think it's the largest private equity fund in the world.
They had this meet and greet at Wilbur Ross's Southampton, or they're having the meet and greet at Wilbur Ross's Southampton home.
And what is Youngkin doing here?
Is he declaring?
No.
Is he starting a super PAC?
No.
But he reportedly sent word to Trump that he's only making these moves so that he can be in the discussion and in contention for VP.
Again, this is all just according to reports from the New York Post and some other places now.
But, assuming those reports are right, this is a smart move for Youngkin.
Because if you're Glenn Youngkin, You're thinking, okay, in many ways I'm comparable to Ron DeSantis.
Ron DeSantis is more conservative than I am.
Ron DeSantis is more effective than I am.
But Florida is also more conservative than Virginia is.
So, given our relative states, okay, I'm doing okay.
But DeSantis is being just ground up in the Donald Trump meat grinder, as would any candidate.
I want to put myself in a position where I could be the president, especially as Donald Trump's facing three indictments.
He's probably going to face 30 more by the time the election comes around.
So I want to put myself in that position.
But if I want to put myself in that position without also getting ground up by the Trump campaign machine, then I need to directly coordinate with Trump and say, hey, bro, I'm not threatening you.
I'm not going to run if you're running.
As much out of self-interest as out of any kind of loyalty.
Don't worry, I'm on your side.
In fact, I want to help you.
In fact, I want to be your vice president.
That's a smart way to play this.
And it's something that the other candidates, I think, did not sufficiently take into account in this primary race.
You can see Vivek is playing pretty nicely with Trump.
He's reserving more of his criticism for the number two candidate, Ron DeSantis.
And it seems to have benefited him in the polls.
The Trump campaign is brutal.
It's brutal.
It will, especially if their candidate's way, way up right now and the candidate is running effectively as an incumbent, they're going to chew people up.
So Glenn Youngkin, very smart, says he only wants to be VP.
Of course, he has no designs on being president this cycle, but it's a long ways to the election and there are a lot of indictments coming down the pike.
We could end up in a situation, very plausibly, end up in a situation in 2024 where the two candidates for the major parties are neither Biden nor Trump.
So what is, what is Youngkin doing to help himself in Virginia?
Well, he just had his education department finalize a new rule requiring all public schools to get parental permission before cooperating with students who want to identify as a gender other than their biological sex.
And I guess this is a win.
Previously, schools and these pervert teachers and administrators were secretly transing the kids behind their parents' backs and wouldn't even tell the parents that they were calling little boys she and her and counseling them to identify as the opposite sex and sometimes even giving them medical advice on how to begin the transition process.
So Virginia says, no, you can't do that.
But what does the rule ultimately come down to?
Hey, if an eight-year-old wants to trans himself, if the teachers want to trans an eight-year-old, they gotta talk to the parents first.
That's it?
That's the best we can do?
Glenn Youngkin says, all children in Virginia deserve to have a parent engaged in their life and to be treated with dignity and respect.
The VDOE, Virginia Department of Education, updated model policies reaffirm my administration's continued commitment to ensure that every parent is involved in conversations regarding their child's education, upbringing, and care.
My goal is not for every parent to be involved in the conversations regarding their children's health care and decisions and care.
My goal is to stop people from castrating little kids.
The problem is not the procedure of the way in which little kids are getting transed and sterilized and mutilated.
The problem is that they are getting transed and sterilized and mutilated.
So, the real answer here is not, we need to just have broader, more respectful conversations about how best to trans the children.
The answer here is, no, this is completely illegal and anyone who does it goes to prison at least.
That's the answer.
Now, easy for me to say.
I'm sitting here in the state of Tennessee behind a microphone.
I'm not a governor.
I'm not a senator.
I get that Glenn Youngkin is in a tough spot because Virginia is a blue commonwealth, and so he's trying to have a more conciliatory sort of policy while still scoring some wins.
This doesn't even bring us back to 2017 levels of insanity.
Could you imagine?
Could you imagine this would be the debate?
We went from not even having a public conception of transgenderism six, seven years ago to, well, are we going to trans the seven-year-olds or the eight-year-olds?
That was about a year ago.
To now, well, how should we trans the kids?
Should the parents be involved at all or should it just be the teachers?
We're just going to, by the end, we're going to be transing the newborns in 18 months if we keep this up.
This was the point of my CPAC speech.
You can't keep trying to negotiate on the terms of the field that's already been lost.
I'm mixing some metaphors here.
But you've already been pushed so far back on the field and then you've been pushed back, I don't know, 20 yards and you're trying to regain 6 inches.
You've got to cut that out.
The only kind of policy that will matter at all is if you come out and say, hey, we're going to eradicate transgenderism from public life entirely.
That's the only way to do it.
That's what the left does.
We would be doing it on the side of justice and morality and sanity.
The left does it on the side of insanity and immorality and injustice.
You think the left cares about, well, a conciliatory meeting in the middle?
No.
Even as they've lost elections, even as they've lost Virginia on the transgender issue, they say, OK, yeah, whatever.
We kind of lost one election.
We're just going to keep pushing.
Yeah, we want the teachers to be able, in their sole discretion, to trans seven-year-olds.
What are you going to do about it?
They don't care about moderation.
They don't care about seeming reasonable and conciliatory.
They just care about winning.
So we've got to do that, too.
Maybe it's the best he can do in Virginia.
But what about those governors in the red states?
We've got to push a lot further.
We've got to go a lot further.
We've got to say, no, actually, forget about the 6-year-olds getting trans.
26-year-olds can't get trans.
36-year-olds can't get trans.
Doctors who engage in these surgeries go to prison.
Doctors who engage in these kinds of mutilations at the very least lose their licenses and they should flee the state.
They should be afraid to show their faces in public for fear of ostracism, okay?
Now, DeSantis in Florida, he's going further than Glenn Youngkin, and the political circumstances in Florida allow him to do that.
So again, I am grading a little bit on a curve here, but DeSantis is playing great with what he's got available to him.
DeSantis just ordered his state board of administration to investigate the assets of Trans-Heiser Bush that Florida has invested in.
So, they say, this is DeSantis.
As sales of AB InBev products within the U.S.
For those of you who are unaware, AB InBev is the official corporate name of the company, much better known as Transheiser Bush.
As sales of AB InBev products within the US continue to precipitously decline, reports are now emerging that large American mainstays like Costco will be pulling Bud Light from the shelves.
Clearly, the board's mismanagement, as well as its failure to remediate the problem and repair its relationship with millions of disaffected American customers, has led to this impasse and will continue to financially harm the SBA and other shareholders.
So, he's really smart about what he's saying here.
He's not just saying, we need to punish Transizer Bush because Bud Light went woke.
He's saying, well, aw shucks.
Aw shucks.
And so it's my responsibility as someone with the fiduciary interest of Floridians, you know, on my shoulders.
We've got to pull out.
We've got to stop supporting, just to protect ourselves.
Now the effect of this, of course, is going to be the same, and it's going to be the same knock that the libs and the squishes make, especially the squishes make on Ron DeSantis, which is, he's wielding the government to punish the people who he thinks are doing bad things.
But he's not.
He's such a hypocrite.
He's not wielding the government to punish the people who are doing good things.
Mm-hmm.
That's true.
That's right.
It's called politics.
It's called statecraft.
It's called conserving anything at all.
Right.
You should not treat good and bad as the same.
You should not treat true and false as the same.
You should not treat beautiful and ugly as the same.
They're different.
And we need to use our judgment and our prudence and our wisdom in statecraft to discern between the two.
Because if you treat them the same, you're going to get a decaying, degrading country.
And ultimately, you're going to get a very bad country that thrives or decays on falsehood and that lives amid ugliness.
Really good stuff from DeSantis.
It's bold.
It's in the right direction.
Strongly, strongly encourage other Republicans to follow suit.
Speaking of power plays, Maisie Hirono, one of the more frequently mocked members of the United States Senate.
Maisie is a Democrat Senator.
She is insisting that if the Supreme Court does not adopt the code of ethics that she wants it to adopt, then she and her fellow Senators are going to force one on the Supreme Court.
First of all, let's understand that the United States Supreme Court does not have a code of ethics, the kind of code of ethics that applies to all other federal judges.
So the highest court in the land should set a standard, should set the highest standard.
They do not.
So this is a bill that would do that.
What will it do?
It will establish a procedure for investigating ethical violations.
It will make much clearer recusal requirements.
And the third is to give the court time to adopt the code of ethics.
And if they do not, then one will be provided to them.
How exactly does, I think?
I'm sorry.
Senator, how exactly do you plan to then enforce those guidelines?
Some of the guidelines will be done through the commission that is established by the Judicial Conference.
And so there are Judicial Conference procedures for investigating these kinds of things.
Good on the CNN guy.
Good on the CNN guy for asking the obvious question here.
What Maisie Hirono is suggesting sounds kind of nice, if you don't know anything about politics and haven't thought about this issue for more than two seconds.
She goes, it's crazy that the Supreme Court doesn't have a code of ethics.
Now, first of all, the Supreme Court obviously has quite a code of ethics.
It's not written down on a sheet of paper necessarily, but the Supreme Court has all sorts of traditions and ethical standards that it abides by, and they're very, very high.
But it doesn't have a written down formal code of ethics.
That's true.
Why might that be?
Because it's the highest court in the land.
And the CNN guy raises this question.
He says, Who's going to hold them accountable to the code of ethics?
And Mazie Hirono's answer is very dangerous here.
And this whole movement by the Senate Democrats to hold the Supreme Court to a code of ethics, that is just jargony, euphemistic gobbledygook, to allow for a Senate takeover of the Supreme Court.
To allow for the takeover of one branch of government by another branch of government.
Because her answer is, who's going to hold them to it?
We will.
We are going to decide what cases the judges are allowed to participate in.
And when we say that, what do we mean?
We mean we're going to make Clarence Thomas recuse himself.
We're going to make Amy Barrett recuse herself.
We're going to make the conservatives recuse themselves.
And we're going to hold them accountable.
That's not how the Constitution works.
That's not how the branches of government work.
This is something that the Senate has no right to do.
And if the Senate were able to steal this kind of a power, it would be I say without exaggeration, probably the biggest threat to our system of government in at least half a century, maybe more.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Michael Biesenthal, 4259, who says, Marjorie Taylor Greene must have been spending too much time with Michael's producers to have found such obscene material.
It's so true.
This crew, these producers, we're going to call them the weird sex stuff team over here.
I would say that's a full third of my show many days.
Not today, actually, because today we're talking about important things like the Hungarian translation of my blank book and the 2024 presidential race and Mitt Romney eating a hot dog.
I guess that's the most scintillating thing of the day, which we will get to.
But I don't want to move on too quickly from the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has to be able to rule itself.
The Supreme Court has to have a lot of authority.
Just as the Supreme Court doesn't go in and totally dominate the U.S. Senate, so too the Senate can't go in and totally dominate the Supreme Court.
We have a System of checks and balances and a separation of powers for a reason.
The reason that we have that is to try to stop the natural decay of the cycle of regimes.
And this is a problem that has been recognized since the old ancient Greeks, people like Polybius, the Greek historian of the Romans, who observed that regimes naturally decay.
So if you have a monarchy, it's naturally going to decay into something else.
If you have an oligarchy, it's natural.
An aristocracy, it's naturally going to decay into something else.
If you have a democracy, it's naturally going to decay into something else.
And you're going to be stuck in this cycle forever and ever and ever.
And so the classical conception of a mixed regime endeavors to stop, or at the very least, slow down that decay and cycle of regimes.
And the American Founding Fathers tried to do a similar thing.
When they established the government with an executive and a legislature and a judiciary that were separated and had checks and balances on one another, the point of that was to give us a more stable regime.
And what they were trying to do, you see, in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
You see in the writings of a lot of great statesmen and a lot of great thinkers throughout history.
They're saying, okay, if we have not just a monarchy or an aristocracy or a democracy, but if we have elements of all of those things, in the United States, the executive is kind of like a monarchy.
It's kind of like a monarchy.
It's kind of like It's got elements and aspects of a monarchy.
The Senate, as well as other elements of our Constitution, are kind of like an aristocracy.
And obviously the representation of the people is significantly like a democracy.
Well, if you have them all at once, maybe you can slow down that decay.
And we have been just trying.
We've been dead set ever since on destroying that system.
The election of senators would be one of the things that upends the regime.
The Senate trying to dominate the Supreme Court, same thing.
They want to do it, though, because the libs have no particular care for the stability of our regime.
In fact, they don't really like the way our regime was set up to begin with, and they want to make it much more conducive to their exercise of power, even if it destabilizes the whole country.
Now, we've got to get to Mitt Romney eating a hot dog.
Really important stuff.
Speaking of the Senate, Mitt Romney posted this video a few days ago.
It has gone viral.
Well, as you all know, today is National Hot Dog Day, and perhaps you also know that hot dog is my favorite meat.
I love hot dogs.
I love them in buns.
I love them outside of buns.
I love them with baked beans.
I just like hot dogs.
It's the best, you know, best meat there is, without question.
So to all of you who, like me, are celebrating National Hot Dog Day, congratulations to you, and may there be many, many more hot dogs served in our wonderful land.
Did you catch it?
If you were listening, you didn't catch it.
I know he sounds a little stilted.
It has a little bit the aspect of, how do you do fellow humans?
He's wearing a hat that's got a hot dog on it.
He's walking around with the hot dog.
It's a little awkward, but kind of charming and endearing, actually, by the standard of Mitt Romney.
Did you catch the problem, though?
There's always something with this guy.
And here's the problem.
Catch up.
He's got ketchup on the hotdog.
Of course he does.
Of course Mitt Romney puts ketchup on the hotdog.
I don't want to read too much into Mitt Romney's hotdog.
It tells you a lot about his politics though.
No person over the age of 18, really no person over the age of 14 or 15 should ever put ketchup on a hotdog.
It is sugary sweet.
It destroys the delicious taste and flavor and complexities of the hot dog.
A hot dog is meant to be enjoyed with chopped onions or relish.
I'm not a big relish guy, but some people like it.
Sauerkraut.
I need sauerkraut on a hot dog.
Mustard, but not ketchup.
Ketchup is for little children.
This reflects Mitt Romney's politics.
Mitt Romney's politics are for little children.
Mitt Romney's politics are for people who don't want to play in the big leagues.
Mitt Romney's politics are so doe-eyed, naive, innocent, or perhaps cynical.
Mitt Romney is the kind of Republican who Either always allows himself to get duped or concedes from the very beginning.
What major political fight has Mitt Romney ever won for the conservatives?
None.
He invented Obamacare.
That was unfortunate.
He was run roughshod over in the race against Obama.
And he spent the last seven or eight years attacking Republicans consistently and undermining conservative priorities.
Maybe that's because he really believes what he says, and I give him the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe when he says, we just need to meet in the middle and be really conciliatory and come on, haha, work it grows the aisle, haha.
Or maybe it's because he just thinks there's no viable path for conservative policies, or maybe he's just a liberal himself.
But either way, when it comes to conservative fighting, he behaves like a child and apparently he eats like one too.
Speaking of mastication before we get into the mailbag.
Another video from a couple days ago that I meant to get to, fortunately we have time today.
day, Joe Biden chewed on a child.
And if you're not watching this, if you're not watching, if you're just hearing it, I don't know how I can describe it to you.
I can't overstate how weird this is.
He leans in, and it's not just a little nuzzling with the child.
I actually think that's kind of cute.
I know people say that everything Joe Biden does is really creepy, and some of the things he does, but I don't know, playing around, making goofy faces at a child, I think that's kind of cute.
But he leans in and just starts chewing on the child.
And then he leans in and makes a goofy face, and then he smells her hair again.
He does the hair smell thing that's got him in so much political trouble.
And my takeaway from this is not as some more eccentric or energetic right-wingers might say that he's a pedophile or something like that.
My takeaway here is the guy is in cognitive decline.
Even if his mastication on the child and the hair smelling is totally innocent, it's a huge political loser for him.
And he is constantly criticized for it and it's completely unnecessary.
And yet he keeps doing it.
And why does he do it?
I assume it's because he is obviously in the throes of cognitive decline.
And the thing that we haven't talked about too much on the right, we've all been making fun of how Joe Biden, you know, is A couple fries short of a happy meal, but Joe Biden is not the sharpest tool in the shed and it seems to be getting worse.
If you've ever experienced cognitive decline with a loved one, a family member, someone like that, you know it's not just a gradual thing.
It starts out kind of slow and then it gets dramatically worse.
Cognitive decline at a certain age really accelerates.
And we've seen it really accelerate with Biden.
And just think, even though they keep Biden broadly out of the public sight, even though he doesn't give a lot of speeches or rallies or campaign or anything like that, this guy has a lot of pressure on him.
He does have to be in public a considerable amount.
That pressure is, on the one hand, might keep him a little bit with his wits about him because at least his mind will be stimulated, but that's a lot of pressure.
That's a lot of stress at that age.
Biden could decline rapidly.
We keep saying on the Republican side, oh, it's a long way until the election.
Right, that cuts both ways.
It's a long way until the election.
If this is where we are with Joe Biden now, if we've seen this kind of a decline from 2020 to 2023, is this guy going to be able to walk around the campaign trail in 2024?
Or is Gavin Newsom going to be waiting in the wings?
I've got some fantastic news, by the way.
Have you ever wondered What it would have been like to take a stroll through the Capitol on January 6th, the worst day in the history of this or any republic.
Have you maybe wondered what it's like to take a walk on the surface of the sun?
You're in luck because my guest on Michael And This Week has first-hand experience with at least one of those things, though he claims first-hand experience with both.
This would be the first long-form sit-down interview that Jacob Chansley, the QAnon shaman, has given since being released from jail.
You know the horn-hat guy from January 6th.
Check out this teaser.
You were in solitary confinement for ten and a half months.
Ten and a half months.
That seems like torture.
I experienced some miraculous things.
In solitary.
I'm freaking out.
I'm in a cell.
I'm freaking out.
I'm like, what the hell?
And I had a Bible in my hand.
I said, I need you to speak with me.
So I closed my eyes, I opened the Bible.
I point to a random verse and the verse was, I am yours and you are mine.
I have redeemed you and called you by name, O Jacob.
- Oh yeah. - What is a shaman?
What is a woman?
What really happened on January 6th?
Find out in this hippy trippy interview out now.
The Big Tech approved version of this episode is on YouTube.
But if you want to catch the uncensored version, the full version, you've got to get that exclusively on Twitter at M. Knowles Show and at Daily Wire Plus.
The mailbag is sponsored by Pure Talk.
Go to puretalk.com slash NOLS, K-N-W-L-E-S, get 50%, 5-0% off your first month.
Take it away.
Hey Michael, my name's Natalia, and as you can probably tell by my accent, I am not an American, but I am an Australian, and I listen to your show every single day without fail.
I absolutely love it.
My question is just in regards to university and how best to navigate it.
I am a conservative Christian woman, and I'm currently studying to be an ancient history high school teacher.
I'm struggling at the moment because I'm finding that my professors require me to write woke papers and woke content that I don't believe in.
Generally speaking, I am an A-plus student and get really good grades, but I'm struggling lately because I don't know whether to stick by my values and write papers I believe in, or to give in to my professors and write woke content that I don't believe in just to get a good grade.
I know it sounds like a cowardice question, but I genuinely am struggling, so I'd love any advice that you might have.
Thank you so much.
Love the show.
Thank you so much.
That's one.
I'm so pleased to hear we've got listeners down in Australia.
I've heard this for some years now.
Makes me think we need an Australian translation of Reasons to Vote for Democrats, too.
It's a good question, and you're thinking that I'm going to give you one of two answers.
Either there's the answer, which I really disagree with, which is essentially, oh, just lie, keep your head down, pretend to be a lib, get the degree, and then later on you can have integrity in your work, which will not happen.
Integrity, honesty, it's something you have to practice.
It's not something that you're just suddenly going to start doing later on in life when the stakes are much higher than they are at university, when you've got a mortgage to pay, when you've got a job to keep.
So I'm not going to tell you that.
Likewise, though, I'm not going to give you the other answer, which is you should just be totally open and flamboyant at all times about your views, come what may, because then you possibly could flunk out, and then you don't get the degree, and then you don't get to do your job, and then To quote Mitch McConnell on the subject of elections, the winners get to go make laws and the losers go home.
I'm not going to tell you that either.
I'm going to give you an answer that a diplomat friend once gave me.
And he described it as the difference between diplomacy and flattery.
And here's the difference.
The flatterer lies.
The flatterer is dishonest and will say really nice things about the person that he wants to impress, regardless of whether or not they're true, simply to ingratiate himself to that person.
And that's wrong and that's a sin.
The diplomat, however, will say the good things that he can say about the person that he is speaking with.
And he will say them truthfully, and he might omit other truthful things that would be a little harsher, but he will highlight the good in order to have a good relationship with this person, and then perhaps to have even more influence later down the road.
It's a subtle distinction, but it's clear enough.
Don't lie, but you don't need to be wearing the MAGA hat or a horn hat or something at the water cooler every day or in your classroom.
This is why, and I say this often, I probably say it two or three times a week, we are called to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
And I think that distinction might help you.
Your job in navigating these treacherous waters is to be a diplomat, not a flatterer, not a kamikaze, a diplomat.
And if you're ever really put in a position where they say, well, hey, renounce what you believe, lie, don't say, don't tell the truth, Well, then the die is cast and you have an obligation to the truth.
But there's a lot of maneuvering.
There's a lot of cleverness you're going to have in the meantime.
Next question.
Hi, Michael.
It's Chuck Meister.
I recently had a college friend, an Indian guy, show some interest in Catholicism.
And before you ask, unfortunately, it wasn't Arun.
He was raised Hindu and felt the services here were just a bit of a show.
He tried going to some non-denominational church and said, I quote, the services felt like a cake made entirely of icing.
When he was raised in India, he went to Catholic grade school and high school, so he's always had a reverence for the church.
I've already told him to read the Introduction to the Catechism and John 3.16, but what do you think would be the most convincing argument for a Hindu looking to convert to Catholicism?
Aside from watching the Michael Knowles Show.
Love the show.
Thanks.
That's a good way to do it.
You know, I...
Love the Hindus.
Love Indians.
A disproportionate number of my close friends have been Indian, and one of my very best friends is Hindu.
And then, of course, one of the great listeners to this show, Arun, is also an Indian and a Hindu.
And I would, of course, like all of them to convert to Christianity.
How do you convince a Hindu?
I love what he says when he says, I went to some modern lib kind of megachurch liturgy and it seemed like a case made entirely of icing.
Another way that this is described is that the Catholic view is first the fast, then the feast.
And the modern kind of eccentric view is first the feast, then the hangover.
So, I would lean into that.
If that appeals to him, I would recommend that he check out a traditional Latin Mass, because a traditional Latin Mass has smells and bells.
I visited India.
I visited Varanasi, which is probably the spiritual capital of India.
It's the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.
All sorts of religious rituals that go back many thousands of years.
Temples to Jupiter, I mean really wild, wild stuff.
And so perhaps the ornate nature of the traditional liturgy and its sheer weight of history, the fact that it's existed for 2,000 years and in its present traditional liturgical form for at very least 500 years and really significantly much longer than that, that might appeal to him.
The fact that there is complexity to it is important.
My priest in New York, wonderful man, pointed out that a lot of modern people, when they're looking for modern religion, they say, I just want it to be really clear.
They'll say, why do you people pray to saints or something?
I don't know.
Why do you engage in these ornate and elaborate liturgies?
Why do you partake of the sacraments?
Why do you do this, that, and the other?
It's not clear.
Why isn't it just really simple and clear?
And my priest points out, shallows are clear.
Shallows are clear.
Deep waters are murky.
They're darker.
There's more to it.
You can't take it all in at once.
Shallow thinking is very clear.
Shallow religion is very, very clear.
And so, Hinduism, which is a pagan type of religion, is extraordinarily complex.
It doesn't really have a theology to it, but it's got an extraordinarily complex type of mythology, which can take you somewhere.
It can point you in, broadly speaking, perhaps the right direction.
So then when you apply the rigors of theology and accept complexity and ornateness and the humility of not grasping it all at once, that might appeal to him.
Okay, next question.
Hey Michael, so seeing as science is indeed fake, um, Clavin had a Creation Scientist on recently and reminded me of the fact that while some of the current scientific battles that we're fighting, like abortion, climate change, vaccines, and transgenderism are all worthy of fighting and winning, I think we're giving up one of the most important scientific debates.
And we gave it up a long time ago to the libs, namely that humans did not evolve from other creatures.
We were created specifically by God in his image.
Another piece that I feel is pretty widely accepted by conservatives is that the earth is billions and billions of years old, despite some pretty compelling fossil evidence to the contrary, as well as the problem of death prior to the fall of man.
I think this is an area that is really important that we seeded long ago, and the court cases in the mid 20th century around education really helped drive that home.
Many of these problems we face now, in my opinion, stem from us giving up this debate.
So, from your perspective, curious on your take of the historical atom and the age of the Earth, if you think it could be 10 or 11,000 years old.
It's a pretty based take, if you ask me.
Really good question, and I know there are a lot of modern conservatives who want to sidestep it because they fear that if they at all question whatever the prevailing orthodoxy on evolution is du jour, because it changes considerably since the time of Darwin, it seems to change year by year, but if they question whatever the fashionable view is today, then they'll be called hicks or rubes or idiots or something like that.
If they question how old the universe is, the cosmos is, the earth is, even though, again, science changes that number pretty regularly.
But if we question it, then we're a big bunch of hick-rube idiots.
So they don't want to engage in that.
But it's a serious debate.
And so how must one think about it?
I I suppose I just don't think about it very often because science is fake and because virtually every claim ever made by modern science after the scientific revolution is false, or has been proven false at some point.
I just don't worry about it too much and I accept the nice advances in technology, With caution, because very often those advances in technology have all sorts of externalities that cause all sorts of problems in the world.
So I approach even that, even the very best products of the scientific revolution, I approach them with some caution and trepidation.
I reject the worldview that has come out of the scientific revolution, which is that all that really matters about reality is fundamentally physical.
I just, that's not true.
That's obviously not true.
So I reject that.
And then in terms of the age of the world or anything, it just doesn't affect my life in any way.
It doesn't affect, forget even my personal life, it doesn't affect my thinking and the way I think about other things all that much.
I consider Genesis to be the most insightful account of the creation.
And so, if in some physical way, the physical history of the world is somehow Different or, I don't know, distinguished in some way from that account.
I don't really care because the story in just a handful of chapters that I see in Genesis most clearly to me accounts for how the world really works.
The one thing I would insist upon, I would not insist upon the earth being, I don't know, 10,000 years old or something, I would not insist upon This type of evolution, or that type of evolution, or no type of evolution.
The one thing I would insist upon, though, is a real Adam and Eve.
I think human beings must descend from a real Adam and Eve, from a common ancestor.
This is called monogenism, and Pope Pius XII insisted upon this in Imani Generis.
We have to do that, or else our understanding, even of human nature, falls apart.
And okay, so let's say that our understanding of human nature is wrong.
Well, I don't know what vision of human nature would replace it.
The libs who would replace it don't have much of an answer to that, and they don't really have much evidence that we don't descend from a common ancestor.
They don't really have any evidence at all of that.
So that is the part where I think one really must insist for one's faith.
Okay, next question.
Hello Mr. Knowles, it is your favorite bass player once again, Slap My Bass, coming at you with a music question of all things.
So recently I just joined a church band playing bass, of course, and my question to you is how do you feel about contemporary music performing in churches?
For example, guitars and basses as opposed to the traditional pipe organ that would proclaim the hymns or I love the bass.
I know you're an excellent bassist.
hymns that you would find on something like a worship together compilation that you would get from Time Life magazine.
I'm curious about what your thoughts are.
Thanks for your time once again.
I love the bass.
I know you're an excellent bassist.
I don't think that stuff belongs in church.
I don't think that Brahms belongs at a rock concert, and I don't think that the modern pop bubblegum music, or even worse, the highly percussive music, belongs in church.
Because music is really important, as Plato points out, it bypasses the reason, it speaks most directly to our souls.
And it can shape our souls.
This is why if you get out of a car and you've been listening to rap music and some kind of gangsta, hideous rap, your mind's going to be in a worse place, your whole self is going to be in a worse place.
And the same thing is true in church.
This is why, I'll go even further, I'm skeptical of polyphony in church.
I'm more a fan of monophony, meaning plain chant.
Gregorian chant, I think, is much more conducive to worship.
The early Christians, Throughout the Middle Ages preferred Gregorian chant, not because they hadn't discovered harmony.
Pre-Christian worship music, pre-Christian liturgical music was much more ornate than the kind of music you saw from the early church up through the Middle Ages and in some traditional parishes today.
The Christians Stripped it down a little bit and brought it into that unison chanting for a reason because it focuses the mind and it actually takes personality out of it.
When the gospel is chanted rather than read, that's not a way to show off your singing skills if you're a priest, that's a way to take the personality out of it so you don't have some some ham actor yucking it up there on the altar, but you've just got the word of God coming to you in this beautiful way that speaks directly into your soul.
And so I would just be careful of it, especially with percussion.
It can rile you up.
It riles up the bass passions, and it can take your mind and soul off the worship of God as it ought to be done properly and reverently.
All right, the rest of the show continues now.
On that harsh note, on that footloose note, no rock music.
You know why the Baptists refuse to drink?
Because they know that drinking can lead to dancing.
That's right.
Become a member right now.
Use code KNOLLS, K-N-O-W-L-L-E-S, at checkout for two months free on all annual plans and go to libri.hu and get your copy of Miert as Vatsatsunk a Liber Nya Kokra.
