Ep. 1777 - The "Prince of Darkness," Ozzy Osbourne, Dies at 76
The Prince of Darkness has died, Hunter Biden is extolling the virtues of crack, and I’m at the White House working on a top-secret project.
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Ep.1777
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And I am at the White House working on a top-secret project on Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Great news on the cultural front.
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Big update on a personal story that's not just a personal story.
It's really a political story, which is why I talked about it on the show yesterday, I guess, or Monday, was it?
I mentioned that I appeared to have been debanked from one of the biggest payment processors in the country, the largest one by the number of merchants.
That was Stripe, because Stripe processes payments from X. Not that I get a lot of money from X, but every tweet, I don't know, you get like two cents or something.
And so for six, seven months now, I hadn't gotten any payments.
And X told me to talk to Stripe, and Stripe told me to talk to X, and X said it was Stripe's fault.
So anyway, I couldn't get an answer on any of it.
It was insinuated to me that this might have been a debanking situation.
And so I just posted about it on Twitter.
And I want to thank all of you.
A lot of you called a great deal of attention to this.
Came to the attention of a lot of federal regulators and a lot of people who have been dealing with this debanking issue, not just from Stripe, but from many financial institutions in recent years.
And I'm really pleased to say that Stripe reached out to me personally.
And so I took the call.
It was actually, I took the call kind of late because I was at the White House yesterday working on that secret project I mentioned.
Maybe we'll get to more of that later on.
So anyway, by the time I picked it up, they said, hey, hey, we want to reach out to you because we want you to know this was not intentional debanking.
This was not political.
This was not anti-any kind of discrimination.
This began because of what seems to have been an administrative issue from a government agency.
And so we totally got our lines crossed and it's been six, seven months, but we want to work with you to resolve this.
And so I take them at their word.
I think that that's a plausible explanation.
So it seems to me this very likely is not a debanking issue necessarily.
But I guess that really highlights the problem.
I'm really pleased to say that in talking about this personal matter that I guess they're going to resolve, we then got to the political matter, which is really at the heart of this, which is a lack of transparency from these financial institutions because I wasn't even told what the issue could be for six or seven months.
And I have a public platform with millions of followers across social media channels.
Most people don't.
Most people, if they're turned off from a financial institution, they have no recourse and they're not going to hear anything.
They won't even be told why they were turned off.
And so I'm really pleased to say Stripe is interested in this.
They want to work together on some legislative fixes for the right to know, for customers to know at the very least why their financial services are being cut off.
Because I think a lot of the debanking that we have seen, again, I'm relatively convinced this is not an example of political targeting or anything like that.
I take Stripe at its word.
I think it's fair.
But we know there have been a lot of examples of that in recent years, haven't there been?
And the people, this could affect millions and millions of people, the people who are debanked very often aren't even told why they're being turned off.
These institutions have no obligation to tell them why they're being turned off.
In some cases, contracts won't even let them tell the customers why they're being turned off.
So that has to be fixed with a legislative answer because the lack of transparency allows legitimately bad operators in financial services to target political opponents or religious opponents.
And you can't even challenge it because you don't even know what you're challenging.
So anyway, very pleased to all of you for calling attention to this matter.
Very pleased that Stripe wants to work on it.
We're working on that now behind the scenes.
My team is in touch with their team and they're working on that.
I think we need a legislative fix because we need to make sure, while I'm so happy that the boys are back in town here in Washington and we have good government and a unified government, we need to make sure that we protect ordinary Americans who hold ordinary political views, who have ordinary beliefs and do ordinary things, protect them from activists who are legitimately targeted by all manner of financial institutions.
So anyway, I'll keep you posted on that as we continue to investigate exactly what went on and how to fix it.
Then, big cultural news.
Ozzy Osborne is dead.
The Prince of Darkness.
He's dead at 76.
That used to be kind of old.
Now that's very young.
Ozzy just did his final concert days ago.
I think I even covered it on the show.
He did his final, I at least saw it on Twitter.
He did his final concert, and then he died shortly thereafter.
We don't really know the circumstances of his death.
You know, he'd been very sick.
He had Parkinson's.
So this causes some reflection.
Because Ozzie Osborne lived a pretty colorful life.
And there's a rule, nil nisi bonum, you don't say anything bad about the dead.
And I really don't mean to.
Ozzy Osborne seemed like a pretty nice guy in many ways.
And he was a colorful cultural figure.
He was also the Prince of Darkness.
I never was into Ozzie Osborne's music.
I got to kick out of that reality show a little bit in the 2000s.
But at the risk of sounding like a satanic panic church lady, I think there are some problems with that kind of music.
And I'm not alone.
John Cardinal O'Connor, one of the great cardinals in the history of New York, he once alleged that Ozzy Osborne's music led to, potentially led to, demonic possession and suicide.
And Osborne opposed this, and it was all part of the big fight over heavy metal music and occult symbolism in the culture and the, at that time, the very secular liberal culture making fun of the uptight, prudish Christians.
But there's an infamous moment in Ozzie Osborne's life in 1989 when he tried to murder his wife, Sharon.
And she writes about this in her memoirs, a very publicized event.
What's interesting is not even that he tried to murder his wife.
It's how he did it.
The account, I want to get the words right.
According to Sharon, and I think to Ozzie, he allegedly told her, quote, we've come to a decision that you've got to die.
We.
Who is we?
You know, Ozzie for years did a ton of drugs and he was infamous for this.
Even the other guys in Black Sabbath would say, you know, Ozzie, man, he could go harder than anyone.
He was just completely insane.
There's a story about him in a meeting of record executives.
He said that he got up and made funny faces or something on the table.
And I think in Sharon's telling, he got up, goose-stepped along the board table and exposed himself or something like that.
Something really a little quirky.
And anyway, then it culminates in this near murder of his wife.
He says, we've come to a decision that you've got to die.
Then he lunged at her and tried to strangle her.
And she clicked a panic button and the cops came and arrested him.
She said that it was the most frightened she's ever been.
It seems kind of like John Cardinal O'Connor was right.
And I'm really not saying any of this to knock Ozzy because in many interviews and many parts of his life, he seemed like a sweet guy and he played up kind of some of the dark symbolism as a matter of art or maybe even as a matter of irony.
But this doesn't get you around the troubling elements in not just his career, but in the kind of symbols he engaged in, the kind of music that he made.
He proved that you can't live ironically forever.
This is a point I've made on the show many times.
If you're ironically satanic for your whole life, dark stuff, bad stuff is going to happen.
And so people are going to be recounting all of his crazy antics, you know, biting the head off a bat or whatever he did, a chicken.
I think it was a bat.
All these crazy things.
And in the final count, all of Ozzy's antics are the worst parts of his life.
They're the worst parts of his life.
It reminds me, it's not just Ozzy Osborne.
It's really any young man who's ever gotten his blood up a little bit and partied a little too hard and been a little too crazy.
You can look back and say, oh boy, I was crazy in my youth at college or in my 20s or whatever.
But when you actually get into the antics, they're usually degrading and they're the things that you're not really proud of and they can have horrible consequences on your life.
So it's not to say that Ozzie had the worst life ever or anything like that.
In many ways, he had a kind of a nice life.
But all the stuff he's most famous for was bad and embarrassing.
And in the final count, you probably want to focus on the good things.
And just anyway, a recommendation, pray for Ozzy.
We pray for Ozzy.
And take that as a little bit of a lesson.
Don't all the stuff that we laugh at and we go fought, this was his real life.
He really did try to murder his wife.
And he really did do these degrading things that clearly shortened his life.
And let's not do that.
Let's try to avoid that.
Okay.
Hold on one second.
I'm going to get to really, really important, titillating stuff.
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I covered that crazy Hunter Biden interview the other day where he talked about how the Democrat Party is just awful.
He was just going off pure id, unvarnished, where he said this, this place, they're awful.
They're all frauds leading the Democrat Party.
There was one part of the interview that I missed out on, that I forgot about.
It's when he extolled the virtues of crack.
Does crack cocaine make you act any differently?
No.
Is it safer than alcohol?
Probably.
People think of crack as being dirty.
It's the exact opposite.
When you make crack, what you're doing is you're burning off all the impurities so that it combines with the sodium bicarbonate, which makes it smokable.
That's all.
I'm getting the distinct impression that Hunter Biden has learned nothing.
He's managed to learn nothing from his life.
His degenerate life full of horrible mistakes and terrible sins that have disfigured him spiritually and even physically and destroyed his family and made him a laughingstock.
He was a promising guy, graduated of Yale Law School, was in the Navy, had every advantage in the world.
They had the sad thing in his life, which is his mother died when he was young.
But other than that, had every advantage in the world and he squandered all of it.
Now he's a laughingstock and a punchline and he's learned nothing.
He can't even come out and say crack is bad.
He says, no, actually, crack is really good.
Did you know that?
Crack, it's like when you talk to, at a lower level, but just as annoying, when you talk to your super duper pothead friend, I'm not saying someone who every once in a while takes a puff of the sin spinach.
It's a popular thing to do, even if it's not advisable.
I'm talking about your wake and bake, choom gang, just hippie, pudding-headed friend who insists not just that pot isn't that bad.
They say, no, man, it's really good for you.
Did you know, man, it's actually, I'm self-medicating and it makes me relaxed, man.
It's good for your brain.
And it's like, no, it's not.
It's horrible.
It's got more tar in it than cigarettes and it turns your brain to mush and makes you dumb and introspective, but not even in like a good introspective way, just kind of like quiet and shy and increases anxiety and it ultimately will make you schizophrenic if you smoke enough of it.
It's not good.
But you can't even say, it's one thing for someone to say, well, it's maybe not the best thing.
Oh, I have a couple of drinks at night.
It's probably not the best thing, but you know, whatever.
I choose my vice.
But don't tell me it's good.
Don't tell me that's what Hunter's doing.
And so why do I say this?
Just to make fun of Hunter?
No, I do it because this is the Democratic Party broadly.
Hunter is the avatar of the Democrats broadly.
They know they've screwed up.
They know.
They know they're out of government.
They know the Republicans control everything.
They know they've screwed up.
They know something has to change.
But whenever you focus on what that thing is, they have to defend it.
Yeah, maybe you guys got a little too woke.
No, we didn't get woke enough.
What are you talking about?
got too woke.
Well, we defend the rights of the...
Okay, all right.
You don't say you're too woke.
I don't know.
Maybe you're too tied in with big business.
No, what are you talking?
We're much better for the economy.
No, we support all these corporations that are trying to import slave labor with mass migration and they won't.
They'll admit in the abstract something's wrong and they got to change.
But when you get to the nitty-gritty, they don't know what it is that they have to change.
And this could be a real benefit for Republicans in November because, in next November, not this November, the midterm elections, because in the midterms, the first midterm after a party takes the White House, that party tends to get completely destroyed.
And the opposing party retakes the House.
That is almost always what happens.
And that's what I'm assuming is going to happen in 2026, except that the Democrats are just so bad.
They're so, so lost.
They got rocked by losing the popular vote.
I think that's what did it.
It's not even just that Trump won, which would have been bad enough for them because they spent 10 years calling him Hitler and they tried to prosecute him on four different fronts and they tried to kick him off the ballot and they set the stage for him to be murdered not once but twice.
And that all failed.
But the cherry on top, the thing that was the real gut punch to the Democrats is they lost the popular vote too.
So they can't even fall back on their stupid argument that the Electoral College is a threat to democracy and we really won.
If you really change all the rules and if you really squint and hold your head cockeyed, you know, then actually we actually won.
They can't even do that.
They lost everything.
And so they don't know what to make of it.
They know something has to change.
Now they might not win back the House.
And according to Mark Halperin, who is a plugged in political journalist, according to Mark Halperin, the Democrat leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, thinks that the socialist Muslim in New York, Zohran Mamdani, who is likely to be the next mayor of New York, is going to single-handedly destroy Democrat chances to win back the House.
And Hakeem Jeffries' office is denying it, but Mark Halperin is a good journalist.
In fact, I just recently was on Mark Halperin's show.
Mark Halperin told me things about my political relationships, about things I do in politics behind the scenes that were not public.
I said, how do you know that?
Hold on.
How do you know that I did?
He's a very serious political journalist.
He is really plugged in.
I believe him.
I certainly believe him over the office of Hakeem Jeffries.
What is he saying that Jeffries is saying?
He is saying that Hakeem Jeffries strongly believes that if Mondani wins, Jeffries cannot win the majority.
People who have spoken directly with the leader, Jeffries, believe this, and they think that it's going to be too far.
Now, Mark Alpert's mouth to God's ears.
That could be great.
Because there's no clear direction for the Democrats, are they going to go more in the Rahm Emanuel direction, more in the Andy Cuomo direction?
We've got to ditch this woke stuff.
We've got to ditch the trans issue or whatever.
We've got to ditch the total mass migration, open borders issue.
We need to get back to the center.
Or are they going to go to their rising stars, AOC, and who's that chick, the new AOC, whatever that girl, the black lady, not that she's the black AOC, Whatever her name is, that one, or Zoran Mamdani, or all the rest, queer liberation, globalize the intifada, eat the rich, whatever, open the borders.
They don't know.
They don't even know which one is cynically going to help them right now.
A very, very good sign for Republicans.
And if the Dems can't come up with an answer soon, the clock is ticking on the midterms.
So there's one issue that is bedeviling Trump right now.
It is the issue that has been eating at him, and there's not that much that he can do about it.
It's the Jeffrey Epstein issue.
Alan Dershowitz, who is the lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein and the lawyer for Donald Trump in his impeachment hearings, and just a very famous lawyer who's been in American politics for decades.
Alan Dershowitz thinks he has the answer to the Jeffrey Epstein political quagmire.
He says the thing to do is to get Epstein's partner and madam, Ghelane Maxwell, to testify before Congress.
She knows everything.
She is the Rosetta Stone.
She knows everything.
She arranged every single trip with everybody.
She knows everything.
And if she were just given use immunity, she could be compelled to testify.
I'm told that she actually would be willing to testify.
And there'd be no reason for her to withhold any information.
So I don't see any negative in giving her the kind of use immunity that would compel her to testify.
So she ought to be summoned in front of a congressional committee.
So that's Alan Dershowitz's call.
It's surprising a lot of people because a lot of people think Dershowitz is seriously implicated in the Epstein files.
I don't think he is.
As I've said, I know it's not popular to say that.
They all think, oh, Dershowitz, he was on the island and he was doing all sorts of creepy stuff with all these girls.
I don't think he's seriously implicated in this at all.
He was Epstein's lawyer.
But he was O.J. Simpson's lawyer, too.
His job was to defend bad guys.
I don't think he's seriously implicated.
And notice how confident he says it says, release the files.
Hollywood celebrities who might be implicated.
Kevin Spacey, I think it was, said, release the files.
This would suggest, even now Dershowitz saying, let Ghilaine talk.
Why?
Because he's not afraid that bad information is going to come out about him.
In fact, I think this is the strongest argument yet, and you know I hate to say I told you so, that you're never going to get seriously new information about Jeffrey Epstein.
You think you will?
Release the files, release the list, release Ghilaine Maxwell, dig up Jeffrey Epstein if he's dead, if he killed himself, if he didn't kill himself.
Just get him, anybody.
We want more information.
I don't know that you're going to get it, but that does not mean that Madame Ghilaine is not going to testify because the House looks like it's going to subpoena her.
Hold on one second.
We will get to more beautiful, important stuff in my mellifluous tones.
But before we do any of that, you must text Knowles, Canada WLAS, to 98-98-98.
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The House is going to subpoena Gheelane Maxwell.
Tim Burchett, Republican from Tennessee, has requested that Chairman James Comer summon Ghylaine for testimony.
So now Comer said that Burchett needs to introduce a formal motion, which was approved by voice vote.
Since she's in federal prison, the committee will work with the DOJ and Bureau of Prisons to find a date when this congressional committee can depose her.
Okay, that's fine.
It's interesting.
It's kind of an off-ramp for everybody here.
And you'll get answers, whatever answers there are.
You're not going to find anything new.
I've said it from the beginning.
I will say it again.
If Jeffrey Epstein is who the government says he is, he's just a weird sex freak who was friends with all the most rich and powerful people, but those two facts have nothing to do with each other.
If that's all he was, you already know everything you're going to know.
And if he was something else, if he were an asset of intelligence, as was suggested in reporting, allegedly from Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted him, who then was up for Labor Secretary Andrew Trump won, then that's one thing.
If he was a super duper spy for the CIA and Mossad and MI6 and the KGB and whatever, okay.
If he was anything in between, if he's not what the government says he is, if he's what some of you think that he is, you've also heard everything about him you're ever going to hear.
Simple as.
Simple as.
Don't shoot the messenger.
I'm just telling you how it works.
Now, speaking of the White House, you know, I'm at the White House.
Well, right now I'm at a hotel.
I'm at a fancy hotel around the White House.
Because right near the White House, they mostly have fancy hotels.
And you can tell I'm at a fancy hotel if you're watching the show because I have fancy blue glass water.
I would be perfectly fine having normal plastic bottled water.
But the fancy hotels, they have blue glass water, tell you no.
D.C. is a very wealthy area these days.
And I'm very excited to be working on a project at the White House.
And I'm not going to tell you all that.
I said it's super duper top secret.
It's only top secret because I'm not going to tell you about it yet.
But it's very exciting.
It has to do with American history.
And it'll be coming out in a little bit.
So I'll keep you posted about all of that.
But it's going to be a lot of fun.
And I think it's going to have some important cultural import, which is what we've got to do.
The Trump administration has a great opportunity Now, especially because we have unified government.
So we have to right certain wrongs, immediate wrongs.
Things like the pro-lifers who were political prisoners under Joe Biden, who demonstrated against wholesale infanticide and they were locked up for it, in some cases, elderly women.
They had to be pardoned.
They had to be released.
The political prosecutions of the January 6thers, they had to be released.
Those are immediate issues.
Then there are less immediate but still urgent issues like political targeting, potential debanking issues we were talking about earlier in the show, real threats to people that, even if they're not being pursued right now, could be pursued the minute Democrats get power again.
We need fixes to those kinds of things.
But then, then we need long-term policies for the United States to make us fiscally solvent, to stop the flow of mass migrants, all the rest of it.
Then we need cultural stuff.
And I'm just telling you, now that the boys are back in town, I've spent a lot of time in D.C. since January, on the Hill, at the White House, everywhere in between.
And this government is moving very efficiently.
This is the A-team.
They're doing a very, very good job.
And they are not disregarding the cultural level.
Because I think about that executive order at the end of Trump 1, make federal buildings beautiful again.
That was really important.
A lot of people are going to say, oh, you know, who cares?
It's not a big deal.
Just buildings.
Just buildings.
What are you talking about?
This is the nation's capital.
What it looks like tells you about the country.
What it looks like will affect the way that the government is run by the people who are living and working in it.
The great example of this is in New York.
When we had old Penn Station, the old grand, beautiful Beaux-Arts Penn Station, when you walked in, you felt like a king, you felt like a dignified person.
And we had dignified work and we had a dignified city.
Then they leveled it and they turned it into a rat maze called the New Penn Station in Madison Square Garden.
And there you feel like a rat and you act like a rat.
It's filthy.
It's dirty.
People behave in rodent-like ways.
You think about a courtroom.
When you have a courtroom that looks like just some tiny brutalist little room, you think you're at the communist commissar's office.
You doubt justice.
When you're in a big temple of justice, you feel the weight of justice.
You feel like you have to live up to something that is much bigger than you.
You're going to get a more just government.
The good, the true, and the beautiful are transcendentals, and they're all related to each other.
So anyway, pardon that digression.
The Trump administration is working on that kind of thing too.
On the cultural front, this little project we're working on together.
And then also, I got a little update here on the Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again Act.
It's going into effect.
It's happening.
There are these longer-term issues, which I think is terrific.
And all of that is tied in with a truth social post that Trump made the other day.
I meant to get to it yesterday, but we have time today.
Trump has called on the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians.
That's the old names.
Then they changed their names to what?
The Washington, what is it called now?
I have Professor Jacobs sitting in the corner here.
The Commanders, I think, Commanders, and the Cleveland Guardians, that's the baseball team.
He has demanded that they change their names back.
He said, the Washington whatever's, he had the same reaction as me.
I don't even remember.
Guardians, I kind of remembered, the Washington Whatevers should immediately change their name back to the Washington Redskins football team.
There is a big clamoring for this.
Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past, our great Indian people in massive numbers want this to happen.
Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.
Times are different now than they were three, four years ago.
We are a country of passion and common sense.
Owners get it done.
This matters.
This really matters.
And he actually, Trump had a follow-up.
He goes, my statement on the Washington Redskins is totally blown up, but only in a very positive way.
I may put a restriction on them that if they don't change the name back to the original Washington Redskins, get rid of the ridiculous moniker Washington commanders, I won't make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington.
Love this.
Love this.
The Libs are going to say, that's authoritarian.
You can.
And the Libertarians, too, and the squishy Republicans are going to say, that's authoritarian.
You're not allowed to interfere in the football team.
Why would you do that?
Yeah, you can.
Yeah, you know why?
Because he's the president.
And the president's got a lot of power.
And that's just the way it is.
I think it's a fine thing.
But even if you think that's a bad thing, it's a true thing.
He's got a lot of power.
And he should use that power for good stuff.
Because the libs use the power when they get it for bad stuff.
We should use it for good stuff.
I'm going to say, after they say that the president shouldn't put this pressure on the NFL and the MLB, then they're going to say, well, it's just silly.
It's a distraction.
Who cares?
It's just words.
And I think to myself, have you people learned nothing?
Have you learned nothing over the last 60 years?
It's just words.
The Libs changed all the words.
You remember that?
The Libs changed all the words, and then they changed our whole culture because of that?
Oh, it's just a word.
Okay, so then you don't mind if you're forced to call a man she.
Call a guy named Billy Sally.
You don't mind.
It's just words, right?
Who cares?
It's just, you don't mind that now in reporting or in even government documents, you're not allowed to refer to illegal aliens.
You have to refer to future undocumented, super, duper, beautiful, dreaming Americans, right?
You don't mind because it's just words.
Oh, or do words matter?
Words do matter.
Does culture matter?
Do sports matter?
Do festivals matter?
Do games matter?
Does popular culture matter?
Of course it does.
Of course it does.
Trump goes way into it.
He goes, the owner of the Cleveland baseball team, Matt Dolan, who is very political, has lost three elections in a row because of that ridiculous name change.
What he doesn't understand is that if he changed the name back to the Cleveland Indians, he might actually win an election.
Indians are being treated very unfairly.
Look, he says it's the Indian.
I'm just on behalf of the Indians here.
He's flipping what the Democrats do.
They say, it's all these like white Democrats.
They say, we have to change the name of the Cleveland Indians because it's offensive to Indians.
And they say, hey, Indians, is this offensive to you?
And the Indians say, how?
How?
How would this be offensive?
We're not offended at all.
We like the name.
Whatever.
Hello, the great spirit loves the name or whatever.
So they like it and people pretend to be offended on their behalf.
Trump's flipping it.
He's saying, no, you changing the name, that's very unfair to the Indians.
I love it.
This is really good stuff.
Words matter.
Culture matters.
In some ways, if we get the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians back and we build some nice buildings here in Washington, D.C., and we tell, as we head into the bisesquicentennial, the 250th anniversary of America, we tell the real story of America, not the stupid nonsense that the Marxists and the radical left want to tell us and the multiculturalists and all the rest of it.
And we tell that story and we teach that story to our kids.
We indoctrinate them with that true story that leads to a civic mythology, which every state has to have.
If we do that, the effect of that could be much grander even than these nuts and bolts policies, which we're also getting out of the Trump administration.
Now, speaking of incentives, PBS and other public broadcasting are all whining because Trump is defunding them.
We'll get to that momentarily.
We are celebrating a decade of the Daily Wire.
That's 10 years of saying the quiet part out loud and building something that actually matters.
Something that the libs can't cancel or burn down, and we're not slowing down.
We are scaling up with new talent such as Isabel Brown and her new show premiering this fall.
New docs like Journey to the UFC, the Joe Pfeiffer story premiering Friday on Daily Wire Plus.
Here's the thing.
Members get it all first.
The drops, the trailers, the truth, uncensored.
Plus, you get to connect with a community that doesn't think biology is optional.
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Celebrate 10 years with us.
Go to DailyWirePlus.com.
I want to tell you my favorite comment from yesterday.
It's from Lewis Fishman, 124.
It says, husband gets caught looking at this new website, OnlyPhilanthropy.
Do you see that's the porn website run by the girl from the ATT commercials?
It says, husband gets caught.
But honey, she means nothing to me.
I'm doing this for philanthropy.
That's a good excuse.
Should we try that excuse out?
I don't know.
I don't know, maybe.
Now, before I get to public broadcasting, a really important cultural shift.
Burning Man.
Burning Man is burning through money.
Burning Man is this festival in the desert where hippies go and they all have sex with each other and do a bunch of drugs and worship a burning effigy of a demon.
They've been doing this for 10 years now, more than that.
So all the hippies go, well, it's dying.
According to a report from Bloomberg, though Burning Man eschews money during the festival, you're not allowed to sell and buy stuff.
You just got to all give it to each other, man.
You know, like, cool, we're all getting together, man.
Despite that, it costs money to put on.
And Bloomberg writes, money is something Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that runs the event, can't do without.
Lately, it's been an increasingly urgent concern.
Last year, after Burning Man Project spent about $59 million throwing the Bacchanal, tickets failed to sell out, putting the year's revenue on track to fall $20 million short of expenses.
That's about half as short as the budget deficit for the Stephen Colbert show, which just got canceled.
Stephen Colbert was losing $40 million a year, but Burning Man, not far behind, $20 million.
Its leaders stumbled out of the desert and found themselves staring down a financial cliff.
Everything is now at risk, Chief Executive Officer Marion Goodell wrote in a series of online missives sharing the news last fall.
Okay, so you have this story.
Burning Man, the hippie bacchanal, good word to use for it, is dying.
You're hearing some other news stories.
Young people are returning to church.
The national decline in Christian identity has finally leveled off after decades.
Mass number of conversions and baptisms, not only in America, but in France and elsewhere.
Those two stories are not disconnected.
They're actually the same story.
Burning man came up in the age of the new atheists.
Burning man came up in the age when stupid people were religious and smart people were irreligious.
But when you're irreligious, supposedly, you still search for meaning.
You have to find meaning in your life.
No one actually wants to just be a bag of flesh.
Even if you pretend that you're a bag of flesh, you still think and you still think about yourself and you still worry about the eternal problems and you still dread death and you still desire love and you're still left with yourself.
It's a line that an alcoholic buddy of mine told me that he learned in AA, wherever you go, there you are.
There you are.
So they search for meaning and they have to find it somewhere.
So where do they find it?
They've rejected Christianity.
So what do they do?
They just go to paganism.
And the Burning Man Festival is just purely pagan.
It would have fit in perfectly in ancient Rome or ancient Greece or ancient Carthage.
Carthage was actually more commercial, so that's maybe a little bit of a bad comparison.
Or the ancient Near East or anywhere.
You just go, you worship burning effigies, you do a bunch of drugs, and you have sex with a bunch of people and you cheat on your wife.
That's if you have a wife, or you cheat on your girlfriend and you dress up like a weirdo, and that's all it is.
And now that paganism, which filled the whole of the atheism, is giving way to Christianity, ever ancient, ever new.
It's a good sign, and it's a sign of the times.
Bye-bye, Burning Man.
All the cool guys, you know where the cool guys are going now?
They're not going to the desert to have weird drug-fueled orgies.
They're going to church and probably they're going to Latin Mass.
Now, the culture shift is really big.
Why is this all happening?
David Brooks, who is a kind of conservative, but even more of centrist columnist at the New York Times, David Brooks has a theory that part of the reason the culture is shifting is not just this organic movement, but because the conservatives are finally doing what they've said they're going to do for decades, and they're defunding the left.
When I was a baby pundit in my 20s, working at places like National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I recall writing pieces that said, defund the left.
And in those days, we conservatives were upset about something called the Legal Services Corporation, which we thought was a skewed left.
And since then, to be fair, the government has contracted with, I think, two-thirds of the nonprofits in this country to provide services.
And a lot of those money goes to pretty left-wing organizations.
So conservatives had some basis in thinking that a lot of federal spending was going toward one ideological side more than the other.
And so that defund the left, which conservatives have talked about since I was a baby pundit many centuries ago, now they're actually doing it.
Now they're actually doing it.
So it's a little bit of the chicken in the egg.
The culture changed enough that we got political power, but the political power then allowed us to change the culture.
And so it's a little bit of a chicken in the egg.
But one notable change, one big shift is we used to say we're going to defund the left and then we didn't do it.
And now we're doing it.
Now Trump is doing it.
Now congressional Republicans are doing it.
Why?
What changed?
Two things happened that allowed that shift.
One, national issues overtook local issues.
People now focus on national issues.
And part of that is driven by economics, by the way.
You don't really have local newspapers anymore.
The reason you don't have local newspapers is that local mom and pop shops are the ones that advertise in the local newspapers, and local mom-and-pop shops are being driven out of business by Amazon and Walmart.
And so when you can't fund the local newspapers, then everyone just focuses on national political issues.
And whereas 50 years ago, your identity as a New Yorker or an Oklahoman or even forget about that, down to the county level, where the town level might have mattered more to you, today we're all just kind of, well, either American or we're part of our ideological tribe.
So rather than looking for the local news as opposed to the news from some other county, you're looking for the right-wing news instead of the left-wing news, or the left-wing news instead of the right-wing news.
But in any case, you're talking about national issues, because that's what has a major audience.
That's the first part, driven in part by economics.
And then the other shift is, we stopped being libertarian.
We were much more libertarian, especially during the Tea Party era 13 years ago, 15 years ago.
We talked like libertarians, even if we didn't always act that way in the 90s and the 80s.
And now we're not really libertarian.
Libertarianism is broadly considered kind of cringe.
No offense to my libertarian friends out there.
But classical political philosophy is back.
Religion is back.
Traditionalism is back.
We're back.
And so we're going to wield political power.
This is really, really good stuff.
And it's actually happening.
And it's hilarious because the people who are running PBS and NPR and all these liberal stations, they're pleading.
They're saying, no, no, we're not biased.
What are you talking about?
You're not biased.
No, please give us our money.
We don't even need federal money.
But please don't take it away from us.
But we don't need it.
We don't even take federal money, really, but please keep giving it to us.
Anyway, I want to tell you more about that because it's very hilarious the way they flail about.
But we don't have time.
We don't have time.
We have to do it tomorrow.
In the meantime, I mentioned to you that I'm on the road.
There will be no membrane segmentum today.
I'm sorry.
I have to travel because I'm going to the Napa conference in California to speak to one of the biggest Catholic conferences anywhere, I think, basically in the world.
And I'm going to be giving a speech there and having some cigars.
So in any case, I hope to see you out there if you're going to Napa.
