Trump wins Iowa, Vivek Ramaswamy makes a major announcement for his campaign, and the reportedly drag queen CEO of United Airlines is pushing DEI into the cockpit. What could go wrong?
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This is the first match for the 2024 presidential primary, the first votes that are actually cast, and he didn't just win it by a little, he won it by a lot.
He won with more than 50% of the vote, which means that even if all of the other candidates had consolidated and worked together and endorsed one anti-Trump candidate, still Trump would have won the caucuses.
Now, in his victory speech, President Trump did not take pot shots and attack people and insult everyone.
He actually was pretty gracious and congratulated his competitors.
I want to congratulate Ron and Nikki for having a good time together.
We're all having a good time together.
And I think they both actually did very well.
I really do.
I think they both did very well.
We don't even know what the outcome of second place is.
And I see Carrie Lake.
Congratulations, Carrie.
I spotted her, I have to announce, because she's terrific.
She's going to be a senator, a great senator, I predict, right?
You're going to be a great senator.
I also want to congratulate Vivek because he did a hell of a job.
He came from zero and he's got a big percent, probably eight percent, almost eight percent, and that's an amazing job.
They all did.
They're all very smart, very smart people, very capable people.
Some consider this to be uncharacteristic for Trump, but I don't think that's the case at all.
We've seen this from Trump forever.
He's brutal when you go head to head with him, and then he's generally pretty gracious in victory.
He says, oh yeah, I called Lion Ted the worst, most terrible man in the world, and I said that his dad killed Kennedy.
But that was then, this is now.
Now I think he's beautiful, no big deal.
And that's the tact he's taking here.
Well, he mentions Vivek Ramaswamy.
Vivek, for his part, after the caucuses, drops out of the campaign and makes a big announcement.
As of this moment, we are going to suspend this presidential campaign.
And this is going to have to be There is no path for me to be the next president absent things that we don't want to see happen in this country.
And I'm also making the decision that this has to be an America First candidate in that White House.
As I've said since the beginning, there are two America First candidates in this race.
And earlier tonight, I called Donald Trump to tell him that I congratulated him on his victory.
And now, going forward, he will have my full endorsement for the presidency.
And I think we're gonna do the right thing for this country.
So Vivek drops out, endorses Trump.
I think the smart move for him.
And people are saying, well, you know, he should have done better in Iowa.
He could have won Iowa.
I don't know.
No one had ever heard of this guy a year ago.
And then his first time ever running for public office, he runs for president.
He ends up in the final four presidential candidates and he pulls 7.7%.
That's pretty good.
Never held office, does better than a whole lot of other people who had much more political experience.
So, Vivek clearly has a bright future in front of him.
The question now is what happens to DeSantis and Haley?
DeSantis pulled out the second place finish.
He was only a point or two above Haley.
Neck and neck, but DeSantis still gets number two.
He still seems to me to be the hardest hit candidate in this race because What last night proved is that the polls were right.
The polls were almost dead on the money about how it was going to shake out in Iowa.
And if the polls are right, then the DeSantis campaign is over.
We've been in a whole lot of nothing for about 18 months now.
Just chatter, and talk, and tweets, and TV commercials, and this is the first time any votes were cast.
And things can happen gradually, and then suddenly in politics.
We are now in the suddenly phase.
Pretty soon, this whole primary could be over, frankly, in a matter of days.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
The CEO of United Airlines, who is reportedly a drag queen, is foisting DEI into the cockpit.
I'm sure that will make you feel much safer when you travel.
We'll get to that in just a moment.
First though, the campaigns.
What happens here?
Trump wins Iowa, as far as I'm concerned, the primary is over.
Now, Vivek is out, that leaves DeSantis and Haley.
Haley might have an argument to keep running, and the reason for that is, even though Trump is dominating in all of the primaries, all of the upcoming primaries, you've got New Hampshire, you've got South Carolina, you've got Nevada, you've got Michigan, Trump is up.
Double digits everywhere.
But there might be an argument for Haley to hang on because Trump is only up 10 to 13 points in New Hampshire and Haley is the second place candidate.
So if she has a nice showing there, or maybe if she has even a surprise victory, then that might get her to keep going along until South Carolina, which is her home state.
Trump is up by much more actually in South Carolina.
But she could keep trying to duke this thing out.
DeSantis has a much harder time because next up you have New Hampshire and in New Hampshire he's currently in fourth place.
He's got something like six and a half percent there.
Haley's polling at 20% plus.
It could be a brutal defeat.
And then you go on and he's not looking good in South Carolina, and he's not looking good in Nevada, and he's not looking good in Michigan.
And eventually, if DeSantis is not going to get the nomination, he's got to get out before Florida.
Because right now, in DeSantis' home state, Where he is currently the governor, Trump is up 40 points in Florida.
So, if he sticks in that long, he could be headed for a humiliating defeat.
And to save his political career, I think he would have to get out before that happens.
So, Haley's got a little bit more time to play with.
Even if it's a complete long shot for her in the race, she doesn't have a pressing deadline like that.
She's still polling well enough in South Carolina that I think Maybe she can hang on.
She's not a sitting governor right now.
For DeSantis, it's a little bit tougher.
I think Mike Lee, the Republican libertarian senator from Utah, made a pretty good argument as to how absent a lightning strike, whether it be from the sky or from the Democrats, Trump is the nominee.
Look, whether you like Donald Trump or not, whether you agree with everything he says or not, he is our one opportunity to choose order over chaos and putting America first over America last.
It's time to get behind him.
And look, in presidential campaigns, there are always a lot of promises made.
My favorite kinds of political promises are promises kept.
Donald Trump has kept promises that he's made as he's campaigned in the past.
We know what kind of president he will be.
And so whether you agree with him on every point or not, if you are not content with the status quo, the status quo of lawlessness, of putting America last, it's time to get behind Donald Trump.
And I wholeheartedly endorse Donald J. Trump in his bid for the presidency in 2024.
Clear enough and it harkens back to a political maxim first put out there by Otto von Bismarck, which is that politics is the art of the possible, the art of the attainable, the art of the next best.
And there are going to be people who don't love Trump or who liked him in 2016 or 2020, but don't like him anymore.
They think this guy would be better or that guy would be better or whatever.
But what Mike Lee is saying here is, There's clearly one candidate who can in any way unify the GOP.
There's one guy who has proved himself to be far and away clearly the leader of the pack, and he's the guy.
And maybe you prefer another guy, and maybe you wish that he weren't, but he just is the guy.
And so we've got to put the internecine squabbles aside.
We've got to quit burning GOP money when there is no path to victory really for any of the other candidates.
And we just need to be a team player.
Wasn't that the point of the pledge before the GOP debate?
The pledge was, you need to agree to support the eventual nominee and everyone but Trump signed it.
Trump said, I'm not going to sign that because I don't really believe it and I'm not going to promise something that I'm not going to deliver on.
And the other candidates signed it.
And then Chris Christie, the first big one to drop out of the race, I actually didn't mean that as a pun, but there you have it.
He drops out and then he says, I'm not going to support Trump.
Oh, so you're a liar.
So you're just the thing that you accused Trump of being.
But Lee is saying, look, Trump was good.
Maybe you wish he did more or he did things differently, but he was a good president.
He did more for conservatives than a lot of other Republicans have.
And anyway, he's the guy now, so I'm going to get behind him and you should too.
That's his argument.
And it's a fairly persuasive argument.
It might not be the most idealistically satisfying, but it is what it is, man.
This is the way the race has shaken out.
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Now, the postmortems are already starting for the other GOP campaigns, in particular the DeSantis campaign, because Iowa is where they staked the campaign.
Ron DeSantis himself is beginning to indulge these excuses.
The big new one of late is that the failure of the DeSantis campaign lies with the conservative media.
He's got basically a Praetorian guard of the conservative media, Fox News, the websites, all this stuff.
They just don't hold them accountable because they're worried about losing viewers and they don't want to have the ratings go down.
And that's just the reality.
That's just the truth.
And I'm not complaining about it.
I'd rather that not be the case, but that's just, I think, an objective reality.
This is not a good look for Ron DeSantis.
In part because it just isn't true.
If Governor DeSantis here is arguing that the conservative media were just always totally behind Trump and they didn't give him a fair shake and that's why his campaign never took off, that is ridiculous.
Fox boosted him in the early days of his campaign.
Plenty of people over at The Blaze boosted DeSantis in the early days of the campaign.
Most of the hosts at the Daily Wire explicitly endorsed Ron DeSantis.
I did not.
I did not endorse any candidate.
I said, as a matter of principle, I don't think that's my role in the race, and I'd rather make observations and predictions.
I'm not here to work for any campaign, so I'm going to stay out of it.
But most of my colleagues, when asked, who would you vote for for president, they said DeSantis.
Sure, over time, maybe some of the coverage changed on Fox or wherever, but he actually did have a lot of support from the conservative media.
Then he says that the conservative media chose ratings over, you know, the interests of GOP voters or something.
But what does that even mean in this case?
You're talking about the conservative media.
If we're talking about the conservative media, then ratings is directly related to the desires of GOP voters.
I'm not saying it's exactly a one-to-one, but it's pretty close.
So, even if there were people in the media who were just shifting their adulation of DeSantis based on the poll numbers, based on ratings rather, that would relate to the poll numbers, it would relate to the vote.
What do I think is really going on here?
People are going to say DeSantis was a bad candidate.
I don't think that's true.
People are going to say, the DeSantis campaign was run poorly.
I don't think that's true.
Sure, he as a candidate had flaws, and the campaign made some mistakes, without question.
But I think the campaign was basically fine, and I think DeSantis is an excellent governor.
I really like the guy.
I think in any other race he would have been clear in a way a leader, if not the top guy in the whole race, from the beginning.
I blame circumstance here, which is what I've said from day one of this primary, which is that DeSantis had an impossible task.
The biggest appeal of Ron DeSantis as a candidate, the initial pitch of his campaign, is that he was Trump without the baggage.
He's all the good stuff about Trump that you like.
The effective policies, the irritating the left, the more hands-on approach, the greater willingness to wield political power rather than keeping the gloves off and just spouting off Libertarian platitudes.
You know, he's the guy who's going to be rough and tumble with the universities.
He's going to fight Disney, and he's going to reopen the country.
He's going to reopen his state, at least, during COVID.
Something that he said Donald Trump didn't even do that.
I was much better on COVID than Donald Trump.
I'm Trump without the baggage.
I'm bigger, better, faster, stronger.
Okay, that was the pitch.
But his role in the race was to not be Donald Trump.
His role in the race was to be the anti-Trump candidate.
And so, He seems like he could have been the best candidate, but actually what that meant politically is that he was a man without a home.
Because the people who like Trump were going to go with Trump.
And the people who don't like Trump wouldn't want anyone who in any way resembles Trump.
And Governor DeSantis has this problem where he just isn't Trump.
Trump is running the race and he's not him.
And he is kind of like Trump.
He actually is kind of like the Trump without the baggage.
They have some differences on policy, but they're cut from the same cloth.
They belong to the same part of the party.
They share a constituency, and the constituency was not willing to abandon Trump to go over to him, and he couldn't pull enough of the other guys.
The other guys, the establishment side, the neoconservative side, the Bush side, they're going over to Nikki Haley right now.
And so, what was he going to do?
What was he going to do?
Was he going to sit out this race?
No, I don't think that would have been a good move either.
Because had he waited until 2028, everyone would have forgotten about him.
It would have been Chris Christie all over again.
I suspect the reason that DeSantis ran this time is because he learned the lesson of Chris Christie.
2012, it's hard to remember now because Christie is a punchline.
Chris Christie was the man.
Chris Christie was the most popular Republican governor in the country.
He could have run for president.
He might have gotten the nomination.
But he waited until 2016, and in 2016 he was an afterthought.
And then he ran again in 2024, and he was a punchline.
So DeSantis didn't want that to happen.
DeSantis is going to leave office in early January of 2027.
That's almost two years before Election Day 2028.
People would have forgotten about him.
They would have forgotten about his big political wins.
They've already forgotten about his big political wins.
DeSantis really came to the stage during COVID.
It was amazing.
He showed incredible courage and incredible vision during COVID.
And people don't even remember it.
They don't care about it anymore.
Political memory is relatively short.
Issues change.
And so it's tragic.
I mean that in like Greek tragedy sense.
The greatest strength of the DeSantis campaign was its weakness.
And circumstances forced this to come out.
He didn't have a better avenue available to him.
The reason he was popular was because he was kind of like Trump, but he was still kind of clubbable with some of the establishment types.
But that was his undoing.
The time he was going to run was going to be now.
But it was a once-in-a-century moment when an incumbent, when a former president was running for a non-consecutive second term effectively as an incumbent, which is how the voters clearly are treating him.
There's no one to blame.
There's no one to blame.
It's just circumstance.
And that's probably the least satisfying answer for supporters of a losing campaign.
Now, there might still be an argument for Nikki to run or to keep in the race because she has less pressure to drop out.
But she's saying all sorts of things that are really irritating conservatives.
Nikki just two days ago came out and refused to say that a man cannot become a woman.
This is a transcript from Megyn Kelly.
Nikki was asked.
Let's get to our last question.
This is from John, who has a question for you, Ambassador.
Hi, John.
John says, a lot of the stuff that Trump does, you know, and says really bothers me and I'm concerned about it.
You know, one thing I saw him do was he said that he had trouble answering the question, could a man become a woman?
I'm just wondering what your response is.
And then this is the response.
I'm not gonna read the whole thing, it's so long.
But Nikki says, yeah, I mean, I think first of all, let's look at the facts again.
I'm sorry we didn't make it out to your part of the state.
I hate that we're not there, but I appreciate you coming here.
Look, I mean, I've said I wanna start with Trump and then get to the question.
This is a hard truth on my part.
I believe Trump was the right president at the right time.
And then she goes into the whole thing about, I liked Trump, that's why I worked for him, but he's not the right guy now and I'm the right guy.
So she goes into that whole thing.
And then after a paragraph, she goes, now, can a man become a woman?
There's been a lot that's been talked about when it comes to all these roles and all these issues.
I strongly believe that we should not allow any gender change surgeries to anyone before the age of 18, period.
We kids now can't get a tattoo until they're 18.
We shouldn't have them permanently change their body until they're 18.
And that includes puberty blockers.
After the age of 18, we want to make sure that people can live any way they want to live.
I don't think government needs to be in control of anybody's life.
You can live the way you want to live, and you should be free to live the way you want to live, and every government and everybody else should stay out of your way.
But prior to 18, you know, that's bad.
Okay.
This is not my view.
My view is that For the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people afflicted with this confusion, transgenderism should be eradicated from public life entirely.
The whole preposterous ideology at every level.
That's not Nikki's view.
Nikki's view is that we should stop transing the kids, but we should indulge transgenderism, at least to some degree, for adults.
And so, it's not my view, but that is the view of a lot of people.
And that is the view of a lot of Republican voters.
That is the view of a lot of self-styled right-wingers.
And, importantly, That is the view.
Look, I think that actually is her personal view.
I don't think she's being dishonest or anything here.
But more importantly, from a political perspective, that is the view that fits her lane in the race.
Her lane is the conciliatory, centrist, kind of establishment, kind of neocon lane.
It's the anti-Trump lane.
It's going to win over all those suburban housewives that hate Trump, at least according to the pollsters.
That's a big view in the party.
And if you're going to compete, you've got to know your lane.
You've got to see a path to victory there.
So, she might lose.
She might go around state by state and get 20% of the vote in every state, and Trump gets 80% of the vote, and then he becomes the nominee, and she's the number two person.
And maybe there's a unity ticket, or maybe she gets a position in the cabinet, or maybe she increases her leverage, or who knows?
Maybe they throw Trump in jail or worse, and Nikki's the last person standing and she gets the nomination.
There's an argument for her to stay in the race, but the only way she's going to stay in the race is by continuing to irritate the right-wingers.
She's going to have to move even more to the center, maybe even a little to the center-left.
On an issue like this, this is an issue where Democrats of 10 years ago would never have said, yeah, people have a right to, men have a right to use the women's bathroom as long as they're adults.
But the country's moved to the left on that issue, on a lot of social issues.
So that's where she is.
She's finding that space in the center.
It shows a split in the party, too, because I think especially among boomers and Gen X, that's a really acceptable answer.
Among Zoomers, that's not an acceptable answer.
The Zoomers strike me, and I meet a lot of them, and I travel all over the country, they strike me as much more socially conservative, the GOP Zoomers.
Millennials are a little bit split.
That's a generational divide, but she's picked her side a bit, and it might take her pretty far if she sticks in the race.
Now, Trump obviously comes out looking pretty good from Iowa.
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Speaking of generational divides, I posted a Twitter poll yesterday.
An X poll now, we call it.
Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day, and I didn't even remember it was Martin Luther King Day until the end of the day.
I noticed That there was some anti-MLK posting going around on social media.
MLK had become kind of controversial.
And so I just, I said, hey, do you think Martin Luther King was a hero?
As, I don't know, when I was growing up, everyone thought Martin Luther King was a hero.
Do you think he was a hero?
Or do you think he's overrated?
And I said, an answer according to your age.
So if you're 44 and over, You know, pick this button, and if you're under 44, click this button.
And I chose 44 because that's the cutoff for Gen X. So I wanted to see how the Gen X and the Boomers differed from the Millennials and the Zoomers here.
And for Gen X and the Boomers, it was 50-50, which is actually somewhat surprising to me.
50-50?
MLK is overrated versus MLK is a hero.
For the younger people on this highly scientific Twitter poll that I just put out there, but it got a zillion votes.
A lot of people retweeted it.
It was three to two overrated.
A clear majority of the younger people responding to that poll said overrated.
And that part I believed.
I got the sense that younger people are not as hot on Martin Luther King as older people.
Why is this?
Is it because the younger people are more racist or something?
No, I don't think it's that exactly.
Is it because they're less educated?
No, I don't think it's that exactly.
I think it's that we're in a moment of major political shift and part of that shift is we're tearing down a lot of statues and we're upending a lot of myths and that happens a lot and it's happening all over the place.
We live in an age where people are tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus and George Washington, okay, and Martin Luther King is as close to a secular saint As there can be.
He is in the pantheon of the liberal, secular deities.
At least a saint, if not an outright deity.
But we're not only going to be tearing down statues of old white guys from the 18th century.
We're going to be tearing down all of the statues.
We're in an age of debunking.
That's the word.
It's kind of a stupid word, but that's the word that is so popular.
We're going to debunk everything.
We're going to demystify everything.
We're going to disenchant.
We're going to rip up these myths.
And so the Zoomers who say they think MLK is overrated, they've got decent enough reason to.
I mean, there was the discovery in recent years that the man was witness to a rape and kind of laughed about it.
That Martin Luther King palled around with communists, even if he wasn't a communist himself.
That Martin Luther King, though presented as a Christian reverend, didn't really believe in the most basic aspects of Christianity.
He denied the divinity of Christ.
He denied the miracles.
It was a little complicated, plagiarized his PhD thesis, which now is a bigger issue because we just booted the president of Harvard University for that.
So yeah, those are all the knocks on him.
The man also did really great things though.
But in the age of debunking, in the age of demystifying and disenchanting, we ignore the great things.
We ignore the great things George Washington did.
We ignore the great things Lincoln did.
We're certainly going to ignore the great things Martin Luther King did.
And so that would be the reason why someone on the right might be a little skeptical of King.
And then the left has hated Martin Luther King for quite a while now.
Because even though King was presented for some time as a left-wing figure, now the left is not so interested.
And I have a dream that we won't be judged on the color of our skin.
Now, the left is much more interested in Malcolm X than they are in Martin Luther King.
Now, rather than seeing Martin Luther King as a symbol of a major progressive victory in the 1960s, they see him as an impediment to real radical change.
And the left now is far more radical than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago.
So Martin Luther King's coming down.
And people are going to be very upset about this.
I don't really care one way or the other.
I think the man did some great things.
I think the man had some problems too.
When I consider saints, I usually consider Christian saints.
You know, like the saints canonized by the church.
I'm not saying that secular liberal culture can't canonize some good people along the way too.
They certainly have.
But it's just not my primary focus.
But it happens.
It happens.
The great heroes of one age, they disappear.
So the question now is, who are the heroes we're going to raise up in their place?
We're in a very destructive moment.
What are we going to build up in their place, if anything at all?
Because it's a lot easier to destroy than it is to build.
Now, speaking of black guys and Christianity, little Nas X The rapper who infamously made a music video of him getting violated by the devil himself.
Lil Nas X then said he was becoming Christian and he was going to go study the Bible at a Christian college.
And he made a big media campaign about this, even though the college said, we've never heard of this guy.
He's not doing that.
Then he came out with this blasphemous music video, very sacrilegious video that we covered on the show briefly.
And now he's responding to the backlash against his sacrilege.
He says, oh, you know, I had no idea that people would be offended.
I obviously meant no offense.
So first of all, when I did the artwork, I knew like there would be some upset people or whatnot.
not.
Simply because, you know, relations is a very sensitive topic for a lot of people.
But I also didn't mean to, like, mock.
This wasn't like a, f*** you to you people.
F*** you to the Christians.
Like, you know, it wasn't...
It was not that.
It was literally me saying, oh, I'm back.
I'm back like Jesus.
And I will say, though, with the communion video, with me eating the crackers and juice, I thought that video was going to be the video to lighten the mood, to take it down, like, less serious or whatnot.
I thought that was something that we all wanted to do as kids or whatnot, but I didn't understand the idea of Yeah, really sincere.
Doesn't that seem really sincere?
I don't know.
the communion which is like the symbolism of like Jesus's blood and bones or something like that I don't remember completely but I did not mean it to as like a cannibalism thing or whatever the freak but I do apologize for that.
Yeah really sincere.
Doesn't that seem really sincere?
I don't know.
I always try to look for the best in people and give people the benefit of the debt.
But he's obviously not sincere at all.
He's obviously still trolling.
So I'm so shocked.
I made this music video right after I made this video where I was getting violated by the devil.
And I made another music video where I put satanic imagery all over the place including in heaven and presented myself as Jesus on an upside down crucifix.
So satanic image there and had all sorts of devils in heaven.
That's just so weird.
I obviously didn't mean to offend you.
No, man, I just didn't know.
And then when I mocked the Eucharist, when I mocked the Blessed Sacrament, I just didn't know.
I didn't know it was supposed to symbolize Jesus' bones and stuff.
Yeah, I didn't know.
I didn't look it up.
You could have looked it up before you made the video if you actually wanted to apologize.
But you probably did look it up.
I'm sure you looked it up.
But he's mocking us.
More than mocking us as Christians, he's mocking God.
God is not mocked.
It's not a good thing to do.
Not something to be recommended.
So, okay, he keeps strolling.
He's going to keep doing it.
His next music video will be the same thing.
And he'll keep the shtick up as long as he can.
And then his foot will slide in due time.
And that will be very sad for him.
This is all he can do.
And more than Lil Nas X, this is all the devil can do.
Nothing that Lil Nas X has done is in any way original.
It's all just derivative and it's all satire and parody.
That's all he can do.
The Black Mass, which is the satanic ritual, is just a parody of the true mass.
All of his commentary is just mocking true religion.
That's all they can do.
That's what the devil does.
The devil just kind of mocks you.
The devil just, he can tempt you, he can mock you, he can vex you a little bit, but he can't really do anything to you.
Because God is being itself.
You know, when Moses asks God in the burning bush, says, who shall I tell them that you are?
God says, I am that I am.
Meaning God is being.
Full stop.
Period.
Being.
And so, God is what is really real.
Really, truly real.
And the opponents of God They're not the opposite.
It's not like the yin and the yang.
They're a privation of goodness and truth and beauty.
They're a privation of being.
They're nothing.
Just a little carbuncle on the side of the bark of Peter.
So, he'll keep this up for a while and he'll keep laughing until he's not laughing anymore.
But the one thing he won't do is have an original idea.
These guys never ever do.
Now speaking of religion and atheism, possibly the most famous atheist in the world has just suggested that he might become religious.
This would be Richard Dawkins, one of the four horsemen of the New Atheist Movement.
There was Christopher Hitchens, who was wrong about a lot of things, but at least he was entertaining.
The late Christopher Hitchens.
Daniel Dennett was the philosopher of the bunch.
Sam Harris, who's gone a little bit off the deep end.
And Richard Dawkins.
So Dawkins tweets out.
Maybe there is still something for me to learn when it comes to religion.
My dear friend and former atheist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has become a Christian.
We will be discussing this at the inaugural Dissident Dialogues Festival.
Sign up here.
Wow, man!
Even, forget about Dawkins for a second, even Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was one of the big figures of atheism in the mid-2000s when atheism was really fashionable.
When Dawkins and all those guys were publishing their books and going on TV and hosting debates about how religion is bad and God doesn't exist, and they were making weak arguments, but it was a publishing fad, and so they got a lot of airtime, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali was out there too.
And then Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a few months ago, we covered it on the show, she became a Christian.
There are a lot of people who were firm atheists who have at least weakened in their atheism to the point of saying, okay, well, I'm agnostic, or I think Christianity is good, I just can't quite believe, or I'm a cultural Christian because I recognize that atheism is not sufficient to sustain a civilization.
Some have gone further, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to say, no, I actively am Christian now.
And even Richard Dawkins, the most famous living atheist, says maybe there's something that I still have to learn when it comes to religion.
This is not an age for atheists.
Atheism is a luxury.
of a once-in-an-epoch period of peace and material prosperity.
That's when it cropped up, at the very peak of American prosperity and global peace, and it was just at the very tail end of it.
We were making so much money, and everything was calm, and America was the unrivaled global hegemon, and everyone was just kind of an atheist.
And then Muslims attacked the United States, and because it was politically incorrect to attack Islam uniquely, there was this final attack on all religion, all superstition.
It was all the kind of, the language of the Enlightenment, the language of the decadent parts of modernity.
It was all religion is total nonsense, you know.
But then history kept going.
And some of that material prosperity was threatened and the peace has disappeared and we're now on the brink of World War III.
And people started thinking again about things other than their wallets and the stasis that we'd all been in.
And the religious questions keep popping up.
People are asking what a man is, what a woman is.
That's not a question that you can answer with money.
That's not a question that you can answer with atheism.
It's a question about what it means to be.
Is there a soul?
The transgender activists seem to think that there is something like a soul.
Because they say that their identity is not their body.
You need religion to answer that kind of a question.
Are we going to have a nation?
What's the proper relation of a man to his family and his community and the whole world?
What are our obligations to foreigners?
Mass migration is a big crisis.
What are our obligations?
What does morality tell us about?
You can't... You've got to engage in those religious questions again.
The old gods have returned.
The old pagan gods have returned.
The old weird sex cults have returned.
So the only way to fight the old gods is True religion!
It's the only way to do it.
Either you just become a pagan, which plenty of people have done, or you return to the true faith.
But no religion is no longer tenable.
That time has passed.
It's very, very mid-2000s.
Very, very dated.
So maybe Professor Dawkins will hop on over.
Wouldn't that be great?
Now, speaking of professors, There is a Harvard professor who has just given the most perfectly liberal take on the entire public square at, where else, the World Economic Forum where liberal elites from all over the world gather in Davos to decide how to run our lives.
We'll get to that in one second first, though.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Marcus Cabera, 4079, who says, Michael is one Italian tie away from closing the door on SLA and insisting she not ask him about his business.
I know that's true, because I was wearing my Italian double-breasted blazer yesterday.
I said one of my big New Year's resolutions It's not necessarily to work out, you know, or read more books or do something.
It was, I think I need to wear more double-breasted jackets.
And so we've begun that and now pretty soon perhaps I will murder all of my enemies and move my family business to Las Vegas.
We'll see.
We'll find out.
A Harvard professor on a panel at the World Economic Forum is going off about the danger posed to society by Twitter, by conservatives being able to speak somewhat freely about anything, anywhere.
For a long time I was on Twitter.
And now it's become such a toxic place that I've concluded it's not a worthwhile place to spend time.
And as you said, it is exhausting.
So you do have to pick and choose.
And you have to think about where the place is where you can get your message across.
But I am trying to figure out, I mean, I have given up on X. What a scary name that even is, right?
And I don't know what the alternative is right now.
What is scary about the name X?
Elon responded, he said, X is just a letter of the alphabet.
What?
How is it scary?
This is proof that the liberals will just present anything they don't like as scary.
And they always, they say, oh, this Trump, he's scary.
Some Republicans, I might not agree with them, but this Trump, he's really scary.
First of all, Trump is scary.
How is Trump scary?
You've liked Trump for like 40 years.
Trump is scary.
He was on every tabloid.
He was on every talk show.
He was a network game show host.
He had a very popular clothing line and clubs.
He's the least scary guy in the country.
What are you talking about?
No, he's very scary.
Listen, I want a healthy Republican Party, but this Trump man, he's scary.
No, you're just saying he's scary because he's the guy now.
Just like you were saying Romney was scary.
Just like you were saying McCain is scary.
Also guys that you previously had liked.
Now you sort of like them again because they turned on Trump.
Okay, fine.
This goes all the way back to the Goldwater campaign, where the Libs trotted out some guy and they said, he said, I wish I had a clip of the ad.
You know, I'm a lifelong Republican, but this Barry Goldwater man, he's scary.
But they'll do it to anything.
They'll do it to the letter X. Isn't that a scary letter?
Would Y have been less?
Would W have been less scary?
No, it's just anything, anything, including the most benign, anodyne things that we do, will be called scary.
And so you've got to not let that affect you.
They're going to say this stuff about anything that we do.
And what's the substance of X?
What X is, is Twitter, but conservatives are allowed to speak.
It's Twitter, but conservatives are probably not going to be banned for being right-wing, and we're probably not going to be shadow banned, and we can just speak.
That's the scary thing.
It's very scary, very scary to the left.
Now, they're plotting at Davos how to control our lives and implement all sorts of new instruments in politics and corporations and universities to control us.
One of the main ways they do that is through DEI, and the CEO of United Airlines has just promised that he is going to implement DEI all throughout his company, up to and including the cockpit.
How is diversity and diversity targets working into the Aviate Academy?
We have committed that 50% of the classes will be women or people of color.
Today, only 19% of our pilots at United Airlines are women or people of color.
And by the way, from all the data I've seen, that's the highest of any airline in the country.
White males don't just dominate in the cockpits, also in the C-suite at United Airlines.
Well, look, at United, I'm proud of the diversity that we actually have in our C-suite.
I think if you look around corporate America, Correct me if I'm saying, though, so this is just based off your website, the people you list as executives, but out of 11 people, three are women.
I believe one is a person of color.
That's correct.
But, you know, in corporate America, I think, you know... That's a low bar.
How do you raise your own bar?
Well, a lot of this is, you know, focusing on it.
We have programs to... One of the things we do is for every job when we do an interview, we require Okay.
I don't care what this man does to his C-suite.
I don't care if he fills it all with a bunch of lesbian, pygmy, Muslim, Zoroastrians.
I don't care.
as well, and giving them those opportunities and creating a stronger bench.
Okay.
I don't care what this man does to his C-suite.
I don't care if he fills it all with a bunch of lesbian, pygmy, Muslim, Zoroastrians.
I don't care.
The cockpit worries me.
DEI is necessarily opposed to quality.
Necessarily.
Because what DEI says is, we're going to make you use diversity, equity, and inclusion standards to deprioritize merit when you hire someone or admit someone to university or bring someone into your club.
We're going to deprioritize merit Because we're boosting sex or race or sexual behaviors or whatever.
Some liberals have tried to argue that DEI actually accentuates quality and merit.
That is logically impossible because the entirety of what DEI is, is saying there are other considerations that you should place above merit or candidate quality.
DEI D.E.I.
in restaurants means that you value diversity more than your dinner.
Okay.
D.E.I.
in universities means that you value diversity more than your education.
That's not good.
That's a little scary.
D.E.I.
in the cockpit means that you value diversity more than your life.
And I do not.
I don't really like Diversity as the liberals talk about it.
I think it's a pretty dark thing and not conducive to anyone's flourishing.
I think it's just radical leftist politics and degrading to everyone.
I certainly don't like it more than I like my life.
This is madness.
This is actual suicide.
Michael, are you saying that a black woman can't fly an airplane?
I'm sure some black women can fly airplanes.
But I am certain that DEI policies will lower the candidate quality of the pilots.
And I don't want to get on those planes.
Luckily, I don't really fly United that much, so that's good for me.
But if you do, sorry.
I guess we should all pray that this turns around, because that won't turn out very well.
Jelly Roll is addressing another national problem.
Do you know Jelly Roll?
I don't really know who Jelly Roll is, but he's an interesting sounding guy and he's got a lot of face tattoos.
Jelly Roll was a former drug dealer, and I think he's a musician now, and he has got a line, he's got a take on Political problems.
That is really, really good.
But because I'm a tease and I've run out of time, I'm going to have to get to that tomorrow.
So how do you like that?
That's me, I'm a tease.
What can I say?
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
We're still snowed in.
So I'm still stuck here in my home.
I've got the barbarians at the gates.
And by barbarians, I mean my little children.
And so we might be back in the studio tomorrow.
I hope we are.
But we'll wait and see.
In any case, Jelly Roll will have to wait until then.
