Ep. 1484 - Shots Fired At Trump, Tom Brady, And The Trad Wife
Judge Merchan in New York threatens to send President Trump to jail, celebrities gather to roast Tom Brady on Netflix, and the trad life gathers new disciples.
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Ep.1484
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President Trump moved one step closer to an orange jumpsuit on Monday when New York County Judge Juan Marchand ruled for a second time that Trump violated his gag order.
Judge Marchand held Trump in criminal contempt for the 10th time so far.
He has fined Trump before $1,000 for a single violation.
Now he says that he might send Trump to jail if the former president does it again.
In Marchand's words, quote, This court will have to consider a jail sanction.
At the end of the day, the judge says, I have a job to do.
Part of that job is to protect the dignity of the justice system.
Because, to Judge Murshan, Trump's refusal to shut up while his enemies try to imprison him while he's running for president constitutes, quote, a direct attack on the rule of law that Murshan cannot allow to continue.
I do not know for certain what President Trump is thinking about the latest development, but if I were him, I would be thinking, go ahead, make my day.
A liberal Democrat judge jailing the most popular presidential candidate in the country just months before an election is the best press President Trump could possibly hope for.
Because the real direct attack on the rule of law is not President Trump speaking out.
The real threat to the rule of law is the trial.
It's unprecedented.
It threatens our democratic order.
And according to polls, most people, even people who don't like Trump, know it.
Send Trump to jail, and barring some massive fraud, you might as well send him straight to the White House.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Just when you think
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Speaking of Trump supporters, Tom Brady. - Okay.
Was roasted by a bunch of celebs on Netflix.
This was a live roast.
It was probably one of the biggest cultural events of the year.
It's really because we don't have any common culture anymore that these one-off events bring people together.
And this was a huge one.
Really big get for Netflix.
I won't go through the whole thing.
There were some pretty brutal jokes at Tom Brady's expense.
Tony Hinchcliffe.
was one of the most prolific and on-the-money comedians of the night.
Tom is afraid of the giants, which is why Kevin Hart is hosting tonight.
All night, he's been using the stool that Aaron Hernandez kicked out from under himself.
Kevin is so small that when his ancestors picked cotton, they called it deadlifting.
Tom Brady is a patriot, which is surprising considering he looks like a confederate f***.
Clearly your ex-wife takes after you.
I hear she's out there draining d**ks right now.
The appearance from the great Ron Burgundy, huh?
A whale's vagina, which reminds me Kim Kardashian's here.
She's had a lot of black men celebrate in her end zone.
Kim, word of advice, close your legs.
You have more public beef than Kendrick and Drake.
Thank you guys.
Thank you Tom.
Thank you Jeff.
Thank you Netflix.
So I say that Tony Hinchcliffe was one of the most on the money and rapid fire comedians of the night, because it's true.
It's not exactly my flavor of comedy.
Some of his jokes are pretty funny.
A lot of it was just vulgar.
It was just really, really vulgar, which is what these roasts have become increasingly in recent years.
So relative to the other comedians, he was kind of on the money.
It was just a lot of that, basically.
Throughout the night.
Jeff Ross, who's kind of the grand poobah of these roasts, he had slightly elevated material, but even he got in trouble with the honoree.
Tom Brady was the only time all night people had these vicious attacks.
Not, you know, mean-spirited attacks, but vicious jokes on Tom Brady all night.
He took it, he laughed, he was a perfect Roast honoree.
But then, Jeff Ross made a joke about Robert Kraft that sent Tom Brady up from his chair.
That scrawny rookie famously walked into the owner Robert Kraft's office and said, "I'm the best decision your organization has ever made." Would you like a massage?
I love Robert Kraft.
I love him.
Let's say that **** again.
Okay, okay.
You can see.
Look, it was a good joke.
This is one of the better jokes of the night, actually.
And Jeff Ross is a very talented roaster.
But Tom Brady said, look, you make jokes about me, but don't you make any jokes about Robert Kraft.
And, and, and he didn't.
Jeff Ross sort of said, okay, all right, I'll move on.
No, no big deal.
Sorry, Tom.
But, but then I went off with a lot more vulgarity and all kinds of raunchy jokes.
I guess not at Kraft's expense so much, but at everyone else.
And it was, it was perfectly fine.
It was a perfectly fine, it was as good as any modern roast.
But it made me think about the greatest moment at any of these Comedy Central, Friars Club, now Netflix roasts in the last 20, 30 years, and the undisputed best moment There were some good ones.
There was the roast of Donald Trump.
That was hilarious.
There were a lot of good, Greg Giraldo was pretty funny, and all these guys.
The best one, by far, was when the late, great Norm MacDonald, of course, gets up there at the roast of Bob Saget, and everyone else is doing material just like that kind of material.
You know, your genitals are so big that they're, you know, there's all this kind of disgusting bodily humor.
And then Norm gets up there and does this.
John Stamos, I want to start with John Stamos, our esteemed Roastmaster.
John, well John has a reputation for being a bit of a swinger.
Did you know instead of an umbilical cord, John was born with a bungee cord?
John likes the ladies.
He has a one-track mind and the traffic on it is pretty light.
Norm's just totally straight-faced.
You know John Stamos?
It only takes one drink to get him drunk.
But he's not sure if it's the 9th or 10th.
Or 11th.
And Cloris Leachman is here.
Cloris, if people say you're over the hill, Cloris, if people say you're over the hill, don't believe them.
Why, you'll never be over the hill, not in the car you drive.
That's the one.
That's the one for me.
Whenever I think about this set, it was all jokes like this.
It was all jokes from the Dean Martin roasts, you know, jokes from the 70s.
So why did he do it?
In the room, if you listen to the tape in the crowd, you couldn't tell, did they think Norm was bombing?
You look at the comedians on stage, they're all dying.
I mean, I thought it was just hilarious.
Well, what was he doing?
Norm explained himself one time.
He was asked, what were you doing at the Bob Saget Roast?
He said, oh, well, they told me to be shocking.
And so that's how I was shocking.
That's the only way I knew how to be shocking.
And it was legitimately shocking.
It was totally different from all the other performances at all the other roasts in recent years, up to and including this most recent one for Tom Brady.
I'm not just mentioning all of this because I like stand-up comedy and the roast jokes are funny.
I'm mentioning all of this because it has real political implications.
If you want to stand out, In comedy, in show business, and in politics, you need to subvert expectations.
If you just give the people exactly what they expect, and you play within the perfectly well-defined rules that have been established for, I don't know, since the last time someone upended the rules, you're not going to do very much.
You're not going to get the biggest laughs of the night.
You're not going to leave any impression.
You're not going to advance whatever your object is, be it in show business or politics, as you might like to.
So, how do we be shocking now in politics?
How do we subvert expectations in politics?
What does that mean politically today?
To me, I think I have an answer to it.
Because I don't think left and right quite works anymore.
You're really seeing this with the protests, the campus in Tefada.
It's coded basically left and right.
The pro-Palestine people are on the left.
The pro-Israel people are on the right.
But it's a little confusing.
There are some pro-Israel left-wingers.
There are some radically anti-Israel right-wingers.
It's kind of a fringe, statistically.
But especially when you get to the younger conservatives and leftists, it gets a little bit more jumbled up.
And it's not just true.
I mean, that's one war and one political issue, but it's true across a lot of other things.
You're seeing a lot of young conservatives upend Republican Party orthodoxy for the last two or three decades when it comes to things like trade, when it comes to things like drugs and porn and government regulation even.
So what are we looking at now?
You know, it wasn't always just the left and the right for American history.
In the early days of American history, it was the Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans.
It was John Adams versus Thomas Jefferson, and those debates kind of map onto modern left and right, but they're actually a little bit different.
Then, in the 19th century, it was north and south.
Then it became, I don't know, in the 20th century it became capitalists versus communists in the height of the Cold War.
And that informed how the right talked about money and talked about freedom and talked about social issues and the left was always kind of commie sympathetic even if they didn't want to admit it.
That informed how they viewed Russia.
In the 20th century the left loved Russia.
Now the left hates Russia because the circumstances have changed.
Now we talk about left versus right.
But that's kind of breaking down, too.
Some people are saying Tucker Carlson's economics are left-wing.
He's talking more like a leftist than a right-winger.
Or, you know, the, I don't know, the integralists, the common good conservatives, the populists.
I guess populism is a good term for this.
You saw this especially in 2016, when the breakdown seemed to be the people versus the establishment.
Or I don't know.
When you look at the campus in Tefada, I guess it's the Muslims versus the Jews.
Or some people, on the extreme fringes of the left or on the right, they'd probably like it to be the Christians versus the Jews or something.
I don't know.
I don't think that one, that one's kind of been tried before.
I don't know if that's going to totally, you know, the people versus the Jews.
I don't know if that's totally going to work, but there are people calling for all sorts of a new split in a new political order.
Of all the ones I just mentioned, the closest that probably would have some cachet that might sell is the people versus the elites, you know, the establishment that's increasingly unresponsive to the people.
But even that is limited because at a certain point you hope that your side gets some political power and then what?
Then you become part of the elite, then you become part of the establishment.
You can't just be defined by your Your position outside of the political order, because then it doesn't give you any room to gain power in the political order and do stuff.
So you need something even beyond just the feeling of populism.
What is it?
What is it?
I think I have the answer.
There's so much more to say.
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I think the answer to where the political alignment goes that is shocking, that has cachet, that wins people over, that is a broad movement, you know, it doesn't have the narrowness of, I don't know, the very online right or the campus intifada or, I don't know, these kind of tiny things, is
Another major topic of political debate these days in the commentary, and that is the trads.
Trad life.
Trad wives.
That tradition.
The trads versus the radicals.
I think that is getting closer to where the real political divide is right now.
Because what does it even mean to be trad?
I don't, does it mean you go around LARPing?
Does it mean that you adopt some anachronistic No, I think to betray me, I mean, there are all sorts of implications.
There are implications that are anthropological.
You think that men and women are different rather than the same, and rather than thinking men can become women, that would be an anthropological aspect of being a traditional person.
A generational aspect of it would be that you have children.
You're not closed off to the possibility of life.
A, I don't know, a financial aspect to it might be that you save your money.
You're not profligate.
You don't just spend your money on total nonsense.
A liturgical aspect of it might be that you go to church, first of all, and that you go to churches that are more traditional, that have more liturgy to it, that have a little more smells and bells.
The reason I think this plays is because all these things are happening.
You're seeing younger people having less sex outside of marriage.
You're seeing younger people returning to, not only to religion, but to more traditional forms of religion.
It's just a social fact right now.
A lot of people are converting to Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy to some degree.
And even among non-Christians, you're seeing Jews who had been largely secular for many, many decades, they're becoming a little bit more Orthodox, more conservative and a little bit more Orthodox.
Even people who were total atheists, they're at least beginning to accept that God exists.
You're kind of seeing those movements.
People recognize that family kinds of matters.
A new awareness that maybe we need to start having kids.
I mean, the fact that trad wives have become a kind of internet meme, that the trad life is even a topic of discussion now, really matters.
So we can go through all this highfalutin, you know, kind of abstract discussion about what it means to be trad.
But the reason I think this plays politically has nothing to do with any of that.
Which is maybe interesting for the commentators and academics and people who are nerds, but the reason it plays politically is because what it pretty much all boils down to, this trad life, is just being normal.
Just being a normal person and not chopping yourself up and dying your hair all sorts of crazy colors and shrieking at your dad and living in a communist polycule and You know, choosing not to have children and all the stuff that modern people do that's really weird and disordered.
It's kind of just being normal.
And being normal is really attractive.
And it's really great.
I'll just speak from personal experience here.
Not that, you know, we're all a little eccentric, a little quirky, I certainly have my quirks, but I endeavor to live in a way that is normal.
And normal has two meanings.
Normal means according to the norms of a society, so that part is a little bit relative and kind of changes over time.
And also normal refers to objective standards, like moral norms, ethical norms, things that are permanently true, eternal things.
And ideally, we like to bring the former into line with the latter.
We want our society's norms and standards and taboos to accord with eternal truths, because then we're really going to flourish.
Because the primary purpose of statecraft is do good and avoid evil, and allow human beings to flourish in community together.
And I endeavor to do that.
I'm from New York, very liberal place.
I went to a very radical left-wing school and then I lived in LA and I worked in show business.
I've worked in politics and show business my whole life.
I've been a professional actor, done all sorts of crazy parts in TV and film and theater.
I've worked on all sorts of crazy political campaigns.
I was single throughout most of my 20s, but it occurred to me, living a traditional life is kind of nice.
So, I get married, have kids, as I've been blessed.
Well, I don't have the kids.
I guess some modern men think they can get birthed.
I don't think I can.
My wife has had the kids, so we've been open to life, settled down.
Try to live like a normal, go to work, come home, eat dinner.
Occasionally even watch a baseball game, read books, smoke cigars, do normal things, and it's really great, man.
And probably most important of this, have a great church, great community there, see my friends, see my family, you know, when I can, even the ones that, you know, when they live kind of far away.
And so I know that I'm not giving you a statistical read here, okay?
I'm just giving you an anecdote.
But my friends who live the trad life, Are happier than the ones who don't.
I got a lot of friends who don't.
Told you I lived in New York and L.A., went to crazy school.
My friends who are endeavoring to live that trad life, they are uniformly happier than the ones who reject it.
And what's even wilder is, the tradder my friends are, the happier they are.
And I know it's just an anecdote, but guess what?
The plural of anecdote is data.
Okay?
There seems to be something to this.
It's my own recommendation to you.
Try to be normal, try to live according to tradition, which is not some old dusty thing, but it's really vibrant.
It's the sort of thing that endures throughout history and is really strong and vibrant.
It's survived the vicissitudes and craziness of time where impermanent things just go away.
I'm telling you that personally it's really good, but I'm also making perhaps the more urgent observation, at least for our political order, which is that politically this stuff sells.
If you can be on the side of the American way of life, if that's what we're defending, we're defending the American way of life.
I like the good old American way of life.
The left wants to take that away from you, and they want to trans your kids, and they want to make you now all wear like Kefi is or something.
Muslim headscarves is the latest iteration of this, and they want to upend your economy, and your family, and abolish marriage, and kill your babies.
They want to take away your way of life, and we want to preserve your way of life.
That's the divide between the trads and the radicals.
Radicals can't succeed if they can't hold the common sense.
That was an observation of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci.
If we just hold on to that common sense, that trad-radical divide, I think that is the best seller.
I know people have their own pet ideologies, or they hate some particular group, or they, I don't know, they're obsessed with some philosophical or ideological idea.
That stuff's not gonna, you need to have currency, social currency.
You need to be able to play coast-to-coast and in the middle of the country.
You need to have a grasp of the common sense.
And you're already seeing a social movement toward, hey, can we all try being normal again?
That is shocking.
A candidate getting on stage and saying, hey, I'm here so that we can all be normal again.
That, I strongly believe, plays.
Now, speaking of people who don't want to be normal at all, the leftists who protest me when I go to universities.
Sometimes I'm able to sit down with them after the speech, as occurred at the University of Utah, which is the subject of our latest episode of Crossing the Line.
Is it a safe place for your conservative students?
Of course.
How would they know that coming in here when there's a sign that literally says they are not welcome?
Now, why on earth would conservative students not feel welcome on a public university campus?
Michael Walls from public night!
Trump's power!
What does your sign say?
So respect existence, or expect resistance.
The protesters were nearly all students in the College of Social Work.
It seems very few of them had ever listened to a word that I've said.
From what I know about him, he has promoted the manipulation of trans people.
I don't want to say that for sure.
When my producer, Mr. Davies, gave them the chance to discuss their views with me, pretty much all of them declined.
Personally, I have a really hard time staying cool, calm, and collected when talking to someone like that.
So I think I'm gonna take the high road, not even go there.
However, after the TikToks were posted and the mob felt that its objective was complete, one student decided to peek his head in.
Like most students, Daniel had never actually listened to my show or to any of my speeches.
He simply came to protest because his friends said he should.
Because they said the speaker was a bad guy.
Happily, Daniel decided to investigate the matter himself and crossed the picket line to hear what I had to say.
That's right.
Our latest episode of Cross the Line is out right now.
You can check it out on my YouTube channel.
It's the Michael Knowles YouTube channel, which I think still shows up if you search for it.
I don't know.
Big tech, you know.
Sometimes they get a little spicy, which is why you can follow us on Spotify.
Some people are not content with the rise of trad life.
They don't like it.
One of whom is my friend, Lauren Southern.
Lauren Southern just has this really interesting interview, this exchange in UnHerd, written by Mary Harrington.
And it's about how she tried the trad life and it didn't really work for her.
It's worth reading.
Here's just a little snippet.
Lauren talks about how she got married within four months of knowing a guy at the age of 22.
She writes, there were warning signs from early on.
If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity, he'd just disappear for days at a time.
I remember there were nights where he'd call me worthless and pathetic, then get in his car and leave.
Which is obviously awful, awful stuff.
What kind of man speaks to a woman that way?
But she didn't see them thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she'd absorbed and promoted.
Lauren says, I had this delusional view of relationships that only women could be the ones that make or break them and men can do no wrong.
So she didn't spot the red flags, even as they became more extreme.
He'd lock me out of the house.
I remember having to knock on the neighbor's door on rainy nights because he'd get upset and drive off without unlocking the house.
It was very strange to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping To the girl crying, knocking on someone's door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.
But as she tells it, the nightmare began in earnest when he was offered a work opportunity in his home country of Australia a few weeks after the birth of their baby.
She did not want to leave her support networks behind, but he used the political and religious importance she placed on lifelong marriage as a lever to force her to agree.
Whenever I wouldn't do something, he would say, I'm going to divorce you.
So feeling she had no other option, she assented.
Okay, so that's not it, right?
That's not the kind of thing that we want.
One feels very bad for Lauren.
We haven't heard this guy's side of the story, but he's not around, so I guess that kind of proves her side of the story.
This ain't it.
Nobody wants this.
And this is being presented as the dark side of trad life.
The title of the essay is Lauren Southern, How My Trad Life Turned Toxic.
But it isn't trad, right?
I mean, even To say, whenever I would say I don't want to do something, he would say I'm going to divorce you.
And that was the religious, you know, aspect of marriage.
No, in our culture at least, in the West, a culture that used to be called Christendom, divorce was not permitted.
It was certainly not a traditional aspect of our culture, but we had, you know, the Henry VIII basically rent his kingdom asunder because he wanted to get a divorce.
He ripped Christendom, you know, in half.
That's very radical to do.
He says, I'll divorce you, or, you know, he'd leave, go away for days at a time.
I mean, that's not... So what... So then you got to be a little bit more specific.
I mean, probably the weirdos at the university campuses wearing the keffiyehs calling for, you know, a Palestinian state or something, they might appeal to tradition.
Hamas, in a way, appeals to a kind of tradition, but it's not our tradition.
So even that, maybe the most shocking part of the trad life is you can't distill it down into an essay on Substack.
You can't distill it down into a tweet thread.
You can't write a book about it.
I mean, you can write a book about it, but that won't encapsulate everything.
One of the great, more traditionalist political philosophers who did write a book on this subject, Michael Oakeshott, points this out in Rationalism and Politics that An exaltation of tradition is kind of an anti-ideology.
You don't write it in three bullet points on the back of a napkin.
There's some things you learn from book learning, there's some things you learn just by doing them.
And so you've got to put it into your whole body.
And it's particular to your place.
The tradition in Djibouti looks different than tradition in America.
So what is our tradition?
And then even deeper, because America is a young country, what tradition is that based on?
And then, I guess, the Anglo tradition.
What tradition is that based on?
It goes back to the animating spirit of our culture, which is Christianity, which did not spring up 300 or 400 years ago.
It sprung up 2,000 years ago when our Lord walked the earth and instituted a visible church with, you know, secular history redeemed in it and visible successors.
And how does that express itself in different particular places?
It's about real people.
I mean, even the fact, Lauren writes here, that she married some foreigner.
Well, yeah, then it's hard to live the trad life when you're married to a foreign person who then takes you to a foreign country and, largely, a foreign tradition.
No knock on Lauren, I mean, I really feel for all the stuff she went through, but it's just a reminder.
I think this is why this view of politics in life is really catching on now, at least among young people, why it's attractive to a lot of people, because it's shocking.
It's like Norm Macdonald going up at the Bob Saget Roast and doing old Dean Martin jokes.
It's just, it's totally different.
From the current left-right divide, or Republican-Democrat, or Communist-Capitalist, or whatever people... It's different, and it's attractive, and ultimately, I think, it's more durable.
Now, speaking of tradition, there's a great economic story out that shows that online shopping, which we were once told was going to destroy brick-and-mortar shops, all the mom-and-pops, and even the big corporate shops, online shopping is actually saving the brick-and-mortar store.
We're not yet all just going to live in our pods and plug our brainstems into a computer and live in the metaverse.
That actually people are going back into brick-and-mortar shops in real communities, on real streets, in real buildings.
Why is that?
According to this big piece, store owners once viewed e-commerce as a mounting threat to their survival.
Now, more brick-and-mortar stores are thriving after integrating their properties with the online shopping experience.
So, it's not that the brick-and-mortars are opposed to online shopping.
The brick-and-mortars are becoming a part of online shopping, and online shopping is relying increasingly on brick-and-mortars.
Shoppers browse in person to see, touch, or try on items before ordering them online.
They're picking up or returning purchases in stores, and retailers are increasingly relying on their shops as fulfillment hubs.
Shipping items ordered online from store stock rooms in addition to warehouses.
So for instance, I could go in, let's say I want some nice new, you know, super trad, Sigma, Giga, Alpha male kind of sport coat or something.
And I go in and I want to try the fit.
They don't have the exact sport coat I want, but I want to see how their suits are cut.
So I try the jacket on.
I say, okay, this guy's gone.
All right, I guess I'm this size.
I'm a 40 in this or a 38 or a 42.
I don't know, whatever.
But I wanted to, so then I go online and I order the jacket online and then maybe it ships to the store.
And so you get this interaction in the world.
This is not just hypothetical.
According to these data, nearly 42% of e-commerce orders last year involved physical stores, which is up from 27% in 2015.
So brick and mortars are exploding, even after COVID, even after we were all locked in and had Amazon deliver everything we wanted to our doors.
Well, how is this?
Managing Director at Global Data, which is the research firm here, says, There was a narrative that as online grew, stores would become less relevant.
But it hasn't worked out that way.
In many ways, the store is still the heart or hub of retail.
Now, I don't really care that much about stores.
I do in the sense that I care about the economy and, you know, I want it to thrive.
And I don't want three megacorporations to have a total lock on our entire economy.
But the real reason I love this story is it backs up everything that we've just been talking about.
The incarnate world is vindicated yet again.
Undefeated, the incarnate world.
We try to destroy it.
We try to flee it.
We try to abstract ourselves into little floating spirits.
We fall prey to Gnostic heresies all the time.
We try to upload our brains into the cloud and live in the metaverse and order everything from Jeff Bezos online.
And still, The incarnate world wins.
We try to separate our identity from our sexuality and our bodies.
We try to do everything online, have relationships online, date online.
We try to become people that are totally divorced from our bodies.
Your body says you're a man, but you say I'm a woman, or I'm a furry, or I'm an octopus, or whatever you say you are.
And still, the incarnate world is vindicated because It's part of who we are.
We are not just spirits imprisoned in bodies, as a lot of modern Gnostic libs would tell you.
We are not just a consciousness.
We're not just our souls.
We're soul and body just meshed together in this world moving through time and space.
And deep down, people know that.
They feel that at least.
And so we're attracted to that stuff.
We were told for years, everyone's moving to the city.
Everyone's going to move to the city, the countryside is going to empty out, we're all going to just live in some modern liberal dystopian skyscraper filled totalitarian little metropolis.
And then what happens?
People start moving back out to the country.
That's what happens.
We were told.
That we'd all just live digitally.
We wouldn't even, you know, we were forewarned in the Matrix.
We'd all basically just live our lives through avatars in some virtual reality.
And what happens?
People, increasingly, are trying to unplug and touch some grass.
We were told that our bodies don't matter.
Increasingly, people, they want to get married.
They want to have more kids.
Physical contact.
Even COVID was the big test of this.
Does a society need to touch in order to function?
Because in society, our elites said, yeah, you can't touch.
You can't hug your grandma.
You can't see anyone in person.
Every meeting is going to be online.
Your graduation is going to be online, if you have it.
Classes are going to... It's all just going to be from your pot.
And people hated it.
They hated it.
Because it's so inhuman.
It's so disgusting.
COVID radicalized a lot of people.
And it wasn't just because some doctor with a funny voice lied to us about a virus and about the cures for a virus and the treatments for it.
It's not just because corrupt politicians shut down a lot of our society so that they could rig an election.
It's because they made us deny an essential aspect to our humanity, which is our bodies and our social nature.
And the fact that we want to see people and we want to shake their hands and high-five them and give them hugs and see people in real life.
Our bodies matter.
The grass matters.
The land matters.
Our real, thriving, vibrant communities matter to a political order.
That's the Dread Life.
That's it.
The radicals, radical means root, right?
They want to uproot you from the things that ground you in society.
That's the divide that we're in right now.
And so we can dance around it with also, you know, some of the really fringe radicals can, I don't know, they can go have their, you know, keffiyeh-clad protests about whatever, like Palestine and Israel.
And that's, I think we can already see that protests aren't really about Palestine and Israel.
It's about something, that's why they got, that's why people show up wearing American flag overalls and you've got gender studies majors yelling about straight white men in the patriarchy or whatever.
On the side of Hamas.
That's not it.
And even the more persuasive populism of the people versus the elite, that's not quite it.
Our problem isn't that there are people who run the government.
There are always going to be people who run the government.
The question is, what are we after?
It's not just how it looks.
It's not just even the procedural norms.
It's the substantive goods.
What are we after?
We're after normal life.
That's what I'm after, at least.
Now, speaking of COVID, and speaking of our elites really turning us off, you got, at probably the lowest point for the Ivy League's reputation in recent memory, you have Harvard medical students putting out a video that Almost left the cringe permanently on my face.
I was at real medical risk of a cringe being permanently stuck to my face when Mark Hamill took over the White House press briefing the other day and called the president Joby Wankenobe.
That almost, I had to really massage my face to get it, but then these Harvard students, they had the one-two punch here, right?
They followed up with that, and I think I've survived, but we'll see because I'm going to watch it again.
We have a message before we get to that story from our friend, Mekyn Kelly.
Ladies and gentlemen, the anticipation is finally over.
The moment we've all been waiting for is almost upon us.
This Sunday, exclusively on Daily Wire Plus, my new show with Adam Carolla, Mr. Bircham, will make its grand premiere.
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Yes!
Headshot!
Dad, my teammates can see your junk.
You're welcome, ladies.
First day of school means the bet is on.
First one of us to get in some... You suck, Mr. Butt Chunk!
Ah, deal got it.
Rule number one, no phones in the wood shop.
Fish it out after class.
I found some really great school uniform options to avoid misgendering.
Ooh, what about their allergies?
Maybe those theys could be lactose intolerant.
No, we can't say intolerance.
We have a zero tolerance policy for mentioning intolerance.
When I was a kid, men were men.
Now everyone's wrapped up in feelings.
Real men stuff feelings down with red meat, cigarettes, and violence.
My name is Mr. Wolf.
I solve problems.
You know what it takes?
Balls!
Eyeballs!
Who's gonna say that?
We're too young.
Well, actually, I was gonna say you're too fat.
Keep my wife's name out of your damn mouth!
You and the geriatric Girl Scouts will be passed out in an hour!
Pass mommy the wine.
The bottle.
Don't make this a prison, honey.
Richard Bircham.
Bircham?
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Mr. Bircham.
Hey, Bircham!
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My favorite comment yesterday is from ClimateChangeBidenBeachhouse who says, Jar Jar Binks must have been booked.
I think so.
I actually heard Jar Jar Binks is on the alt-right.
I don't know.
I know Han Solo, you know, Harrison Ford is a liberal, but I think he's sort of checked out.
He just wants to fly his planes and smoke his pot.
James Earl Jones is a Republican.
Darth Vader, probably the most beloved of the actors and the best actor from the Star Wars movies.
I think he's a Republican.
I know he's a Catholic.
Who else do you have?
Peter Cushing, he's dead, so he could vote for Biden.
And then Jar Jar.
I don't know what Jar Jar's sympathy is like, but I guess he was booked so they had to stick with Luke Skywalker.
Harvard Medical School.
Really?
They said, hey, the Ivy League still has one tiny modicum of respectability left.
We need to make sure we destroy that.
Take it away.
looking at my notes but my knowledge ain't fleeting space repetition give me something to believe in pass all my tests but i just skim the re-end in the food chain we're the ones that eat you harvard med ain't no bottom fear md stands for my demeanor ask permission before i ever greet you does it radiate does it come with strain scale one to ten can you rate the pain when i knock the door you ask who i can rate the pain my coat it'll spell my name yeah yeah yeah it's a Yeah, you're messing with some Harvard MDs.
Found my best friends for life from this Harvard MD.
Giving everything we got for this Harvard MD.
Now from the top, make it drop, come get your Harvard MD.
You got your offer, now say yes to this Harvard MD.
We're talking doc, doc, doc.
That's a Harvard MD.
You deserve the spot.
You got future Harvard MD.
There's some docs in this house.
First question, does Harvard admit men anymore into its medical school or is it just women?
Is it just perfectly politically acceptable, multicultural, rapping women?
Maybe it's that.
I'd like to spell this out now.
I don't know if I'll be able to put it in my will, I don't have a living will, but if I am ever, you know, God forbid, I get these threats sometimes when I go speak at schools.
I was invited to Harvard though, the administration under that plagiarist president, Claudine Gay, they shut down my speech last year.
But, you know, I go to these schools, I get these threats, if I ever, God forbid, am shot, like bullets all through me, like I'm Swiss cheese, and I am taken semi-conscious, or maybe I'm totally out, to an operating room somewhere, and one of those rapping women comes out to operate on me, I'm asking Ben Davies here or Professor Jacob or any of my production team, please drive me to another hospital.
I know you're going to say, Michael, you're pouring blood.
I'd rather take the chance.
Drive me to a hospital.
Drive me to the bad hospital across town where maybe the doctors didn't go to Harvard Medical School, but they don't rap like this.
I don't know about you.
I would not trust those people to operate on me.
Maybe they got good scores on their tests?
Maybe?
I don't know.
I mean, at least for undergraduate, Yale and maybe Harvard stopped looking at the SAT for a few years.
I think they recently reinstituted it because a bunch of, you know, let's say unqualified candidates made it in.
But I don't know.
Even if these kids did well on their tests, The thing that's really cringe about this, and off-putting, not only politically, but even as a matter of patients looking at prospective doctors, is how self-satisfied these people are.
This is the biggest problem with these schools.
Biggest problem with the Ivy League schools, and especially the trade schools, the professional schools, like the medical schools and the law schools, but the undergraduates too.
They're so self-congratulatory.
They think that because you were the valedictorian at your high school, and you got a perfect score on your SAT, or a relatively high score on your SAT, or you were just an affirmative action case or something, and because you, I don't know, you were the class president or something, that because of that, you're done.
You've won the lottery of life, and you're the greatest thing ever, and you never have to work again.
But that was part of the rap, right?
I don't, I'm not studying for my tests, but I'm still doing well.
Yeah, right, because you can't, it's impossible to fail out of these schools.
It's still hard to get in, but it's pretty much impossible to fail out.
I remember when I was admitted into undergraduate, the alumnus who interviewed me, he said, Michael, it's very hard to get in, but it pretty much requires an act of violence to be booted out of the school.
Very easy to graduate.
And now, these days, you see acts of violence committed by the students, and even that might not kick them out.
This is a big problem, and it's a big turnoff.
It's the self-congratulations, the self-satisfaction that really appears to be unearned.
I think this is what's leading to a lot of the anti-elitism or the populism or whatever.
It's not that there is an elite.
I like there being an elite.
I like that there are people who are smarter than me.
Very well off if I were the smartest person in the world.
I like if I were the most knowledgeable person in the world.
If I were the most capable person in the world, you know, the society would crumble in two seconds.
Okay, it's good.
And even the fact that there are hierarchies.
So hierarchies just emerge out of nature.
It's not a bad thing.
The left says we need to all be totally egalitarian and bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator and we're all living as Harrison Bergeron like we're in a Kurt Vonnegut story or something.
But I don't mind that.
I don't mind that there are people who are Richer than me.
I don't mind that there are people who are more powerful than me.
I don't mind that certain people run the government.
That's how governments work.
The problem is, these people are not good at it.
The problem is that our elites are not that smart, and they're not that educated, and they're not very competent, and they don't seem to have our best interests at heart a lot of the time.
They don't give a damn about the common good a lot of the time, even as a matter of their own ideologies, and they're just bad at it, and they're so self-satisfied.
I am quite confident that there were absolute divine right monarchs in Western history who were much less self-confident than these people are.
Because at least the absolute divine right monarchs knew they had to answer to God.
These people, half the time, more than half the time probably, they don't even believe in God.
They view themselves as gods.
Which is always an undeserved and foolish view of oneself, but especially now when our elites know much, much less and possess many fewer practical skills than their forebears, whom they regularly denigrate.
Now, speaking of bad education, there's a Girl Scout troop in St.
Louis.
I think they've now broken away from the formal organization.
It might be an independent Girl Scout troop, but They're learning new chants.
So they're out there, they're protesting.
Already, bad sign.
Red flag.
I want my Girl Scouts to be selling me cookies.
I want my Girl Scouts maybe to be winning little merit badges for knitting socks or I don't know what the Girl Scouts really do.
But I like the cookies.
I don't want them to be chanting with a bullhorn and then this is what they're chanting.
Very weird to have little girls, like six-year-old girls chanting this.
The full chant was, hey Israel, na-na-na-boo-boo, my Sido, or Sido, I guess that means grandfather in some language, is older than you.
Like we're, you know, the Palestinians had the land before the Jews or whatever.
Weird.
It's weird, man.
I don't... I know Israel-Palestine is a complex issue, but I don't... Maybe you're the biggest Israel supporter ever, and you think we should wipe out all the Palestinians.
Maybe you're the biggest Palestine supporter ever, you think we should wipe out all the Israelis.
Maybe you're a Muslim, maybe you're a Jew, maybe you hate the Muslims, maybe you hate the Jews.
And maybe you form your political thoughts, other people have in the past, over any of those topics.
You have to agree, I think, if you're even in any way tethered to reality, that is really weird.
That's really weird to have little Girl Scouts doing that.
That's off-putting.
I don't care how much you support Palestine or whatever.
That's off-putting to anyone.
No one wants that.
The vast majority of people don't want that.
I think running against that kind of thing, it's the same reason why running against, you know, transing the kids is a very powerful political campaign.
It's just, we just all know it's really weird and totally out of keeping with our tradition and with morality and with normality.
It's just weird and don't...
If we could just offer people a political option of, hey, all the really weird stuff, everything that's really screwed up, we're against it.
And we're for having a good life.
And we're for the good old American way of life that you had until five seconds ago.
That's a great realignment, as far as I'm concerned.
Then we win, no matter how disconnected our political class is.
