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March 31, 2026 - The Michael Knowles Show
48:27
Ep. 1943 - NBA Player CUT For Criticizing LGBTQ Pride Propaganda

Michael Knowles dismantles conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk's assassination, then condemns the Chicago Bulls for firing Jaden Ivey over Christian views on homosexuality. He critiques modern liberalism's rejection of marital sexual duties and attacks Ohio Democrats for blocking indecent exposure laws to protect Pride events, arguing this reflects a vision of sexualizing children. Knowles contrasts Trump's bold Miami library with Obama's ugly Chicago structure, linking architecture to presidential character, while noting Eric Swalwell's legal threats regarding Chinese spy documents. Ultimately, the episode portrays contemporary culture as defined by moral relativism and political hypocrisy. [Automatically generated summary]

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Blasphemy Laws and Pride Month 00:10:03
The Chicago Bulls fire player Jaden Ivey for not being sufficiently gay in the run-up to Pride Month.
The Daily Mail stokes conspiracy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and Eric Trump debuts his father's future presidential library, which totally mogs that brutalist trash that Obama built in Chicago and which, at a deeper level, tells us about the souls of the two presidents.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Do wives need to sleep with their husbands?
The Washington Post takes on this very important tabloid journalist question.
It's actually not, it's actually a deep question, but they are turning their newspaper into even more tabloid trash.
And we will get into it because there's a lot of meaning there into what marriage even is.
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For the first time in 30 years, I am paying attention to the NBA.
I don't care about the NBA.
I thought the Chicago Bulls, actually, also back then the Chicago Bulls, I thought they were cool in the 90s because everyone did.
Michael Jordan and Lattrell Spreewell, Dennis Rodman.
Actually, Dennis Rodman probably would have been okay for Pride Month, but this guy is not.
Jaden Ivey.
Jaden Ivey is a basketball player.
That's basically all I know about him.
But beyond the basketball court, I know that he holds Christian views of sexual ethics.
The world can proclaim LGBTQ.
Right?
They proclaim Pride Month and the NBA.
They proclaim it.
They show it to the world.
They say, come, come, come, join us for Pride, for Pride Month.
To celebrate unrighteousness.
They proclaim it.
They proclaim it on the billboards.
They proclaim it in the streets.
Unrighteousness.
So how is it that one can't speak righteousness?
How is it one that, how are they to say that you, man, this man is crazy?
Okay, so he just says that in his view, gay stuff is not righteous.
For that, this guy was fired from the Chicago Bulls.
Mind you, even a semi-orthodox view of every major world religion, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, on and on and on, holds that homosexual acts are not allowed, that it's unrighteous.
In fact, some of his language here was pretty mild by comparison to, say, scripture, right?
Jews and Christians reading the Old Testament view these acts as an abomination.
He didn't even say abomination.
He just said, look, it's not righteous, and you're seeing all this weird stuff on the billboards, and it's no good.
And for that, the Chicago Bulls fired him.
According to the Bulls statement, there is a certain level of expectations and standards that are here.
That's Coach Billy Donovan.
We have people from all walks of life working in the building and players from all different walks of life.
So the first thing is that everyone comes with their own personal experiences, right?
But we have to all be professional.
There has to be a high level of respect for one another, and we've got to help each other and be accountable toward those standards.
Now, hold on, I just have to correct this guy for a second.
He said, we have people from all walks of life working in the building, players from all walks of life.
That's not true.
Because if a player comes out and expresses his religious views of sexual ethics, if he's a practicing Christian or Jew or Muslim, as I said, he's not welcome there.
So the Bulls have liberals and they have sexual revolutionaries and they have hardcore leftists.
And in fairness, they have conservatives and Christians and Jews and Muslims, maybe in principle, as long as they shut up, as long as they don't say what they believe.
But if they do say what they believe, they're going to be axed.
They're not welcome.
He concludes, from ownership, Jerry and Michael Reinsdorf down to the front office, Executive Vice President Arturas, Karnasovis, and general manager Mark Eversley, me as a coach, and even to the players, there's a certain standard we all want to live by.
We're all responsible for that standard.
So what is this?
This is effectively a blasphemy law.
That's the point to take home.
It's not a blasphemy law in that this bulls player isn't cursing God.
He isn't saying anything truly sacrilegious.
He's cursing the false gods of liberalism, the gods of weird sex stuff and maximizing individual autonomy and the gods of never publicly proclaiming your Christian or I guess Jewish or Muslim faith.
That's it.
That's effectively a blasphemy law.
This guy was fired because he was too outspokenly Christian.
That's it.
Now, that should be illegal.
By the letter of the law, I guess that is illegal, and yet it happens all the time.
And his firing further infringes on the civil rights of, I don't want to keep repeating the three monotheistic religions.
I would say anyone who holds anything even resembling traditional sexual ethics, it further infringes on their rights because it's a signal, hey, you could lose your job, and the government's not going to do anything to stop it.
That's how it goes.
So the point for all of us is to recognize that, and this is an issue that I actually wrote a whole book about called Speechless Controlling Risk Controlling Minds, which you can get wherever fine books are sold.
The debate, I know we're in LA right now, that the ding is going to be a little delayed.
Look, I'm being very forgiving today in the spirit of charity.
It's Holy Week.
The debate that we think we're having, that a lot on the right thought we were having between free speech and censorship, that's fake.
We are going to live in some religiously informed country.
The question is, what God are we going to worship?
We have the liturgical calendar.
We have the Pride Month, multiple months.
We have the secular saints.
We have the liturgies of liberalism.
We have all this stuff.
And it doesn't just affect the right-wing conservative at a liberal college.
It doesn't just affect your outspoken MAGA uncle at his job where he just couldn't keep his mouth shut.
This is affecting the NBA.
Look, I find it offensive when people come out and say we should trans little kids.
I find it offensive when people say we should kill babies.
I think people probably should lose their jobs if they support killing babies.
But we don't insist upon that.
We have a great degree of toleration for this kind of stuff.
And maybe we shouldn't.
Maybe we shouldn't.
Maybe our liberalism, we on the right, maybe our liberalism has allowed the left to clamp down so strongly on these standards.
I'm in LA right now, I just mentioned.
Just a few days ago, someone tagged on a wall with graffiti, kill your local ICE agent.
Big letters.
People were filming him as he did it.
This was during the No Kings rally.
Kill your local ICE agent.
You know what's going to happen to that person?
Nothing.
Nothing's going to happen to that guy.
He is inciting violence against federal law enforcement.
Nothing's going to happen to that guy.
He won't be arrested, almost certainly.
If he is arrested, he'll get off the hook in two seconds.
Kill your local ICE agent.
You're good.
You'll actually be celebrated, at least tacitly, by liberal politicians.
But what if that sign said, don't be gay?
What if that sign said what the Chicago bull said?
I don't think that LGBT stuff is righteous.
The guy would have been arrested for a hate crime.
He would have been arrested first for vandalism, property crimes, and then it would have been aggravated.
It would have been exacerbated by hate crimes.
That's what would have happened.
There'd be a federal civil rights investigation into that.
Nothing Happens to the Guy 00:02:17
These are the standards we live by.
And so for the people who they're normal people, center left, moderate, center-right, the ones who say, well, you know, the left has gone far, but some of these right-wingers, they're really, these Christian nationalists, I don't know about them.
I don't, you know, I don't want to live in a theocracy.
First of all, you're not going to live in a theocracy.
Theocracy is government by clerics.
But let me tell you something.
No matter how extreme the Christian right, the Christian nationalists were to go, they would not have one 100th the zeal of the leftists who insist upon their moral precepts, which are not moral at all.
In fact, they're immoral precepts.
Okay, I want to get to a really, really frustrating headline that just came out of the Daily Mail that's going viral that is spreading conspiracy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
We'll get to that in one moment.
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Conspiracy Theories on Bullets 00:10:31
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The Daily Mail runs this headline yesterday that took over social media.
Odds are, if you have family members who are at all interested in politics, they have posted this article.
They've shared it.
It was trending.
Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did not, all caps, did not match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson.
New court filing claims.
Right off the bat, you see this last part.
They say new court filing claims.
This is a claim that is being made by the defense.
This is a claim being made by the guy who allegedly murdered Charlie Kirk, the leftist with the trans furry boyfriend who killed Charlie.
His lawyers have made this claim.
So right off the bat, you say, hold on, why are we giving credence to what his lawyers are saying?
But then just the headline.
Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did not match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson.
You just read into the article.
I'll just read you the first three paragraphs, short paragraphs.
The bullet that killed conservative commentator Charlie Kirk may not match the rifle used by suspect Tyler Robinson.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hold on.
Headline says did not.
First sentence says may not.
So right off the bat, we know the headline's a lie.
But then it says, okay, may not match the rifle.
Robinson, 22, is facing capital murder charges and a potential death sentence for Kirk's murder at Utah Valley University on September 10th.
But his defense attorneys now argue that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and Explosives, quote, was unable to identify the bullet recovered at autopsy to the rifle allegedly tied to Mr. Robinson.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
The first claim was the bullets don't match.
The inescapable implication being that this guy, Tyler Robinson, did not actually murder Charlie Kirk.
That's the inescapable conclusion you would have to draw from that headline.
Then the first sentence contradicts the headline, says it may not match.
And then the third sentence tells you what actually happened.
The ATF just couldn't identify the bullet because it was split into fragments.
It's not that they identified it as a bullet that doesn't match the gun.
They didn't identify the bullet at all because the fragments were exploded.
So it might match the gun, might not match the gun.
Based strictly on the bullet, you just can't come to a conclusion.
You know what can lead you to a conclusion?
The fact that Tyler Robinson, allegedly, confessed to the crime multiple times through multiple media, including to his father, who turned him into the police.
His fingerprints were found on the gun, and the gun fired a bullet at Charlie, a bullet which exploded such that the ATF can't perfectly identify with 100% certainty exactly what kind of bullet it is because it exploded, but which nevertheless obviously was fired from this gun.
Why does this one irk me?
There have been conspiracy theories floating around Charlie's murder from five seconds after he was killed.
As he was dying, you had conspiracy theories, first launched by the left, by the way, floating around.
You had Matthew Dowd, the Democrat strategist on MSNBC.
He floated the first quasi-conspiracy theory, which is saying that he did it to himself.
Said, ah, Charlie, you know, he spoke hate, and this is what happens when you speak hate.
That's not a, I guess that's more victim blaming.
It's got a twinge of conspiracy theory to it.
Then you had people saying maybe it was a radical right-winger who did it.
Then, then, then.
But why does this irritate?
People have been doing this forever, and they always do this when someone's assassinated.
When any major event happens, conspiracy theories explode.
In very rare circumstances, the conspiracy theories turn, if they don't turn out to be right, they at least raise some questions about what happened.
But the overwhelming majority of the time, they're not true.
But people go there.
Okay, so why does this one bother me?
Here's why.
It occurred to me.
One, there's a difference between speculating on the murder of Charlie Kirk and whether or not we went to the moon or something, or whether or not someone blew up the Titanic, or I don't know, any of the kind of outlandish conspiracy theories that nevertheless are, you know, the thing about the moon, that's kind of fun to think about.
Did we fake it?
Was it Stanley Kubrick did, I don't know how we fooled the Soviet Union, I don't know how we got them to go along with it, but ah, that's kind of fun.
It's kind of trivial.
It's kind of inconsequential.
With this one, though, and I've seen this up close, not just because I was pals with Charlie, but because the person who allegedly killed Charlie, that kind of person, has threatened to and attempted to injure a lot of us on the right for a very long time.
A guy went to prison, federal prison, for throwing an explosive at one of my speaking events at the University of Pittsburgh, where I was discussing the exact same issues that allegedly motivated Tyler Robinson to murder Charlie.
Okay, so you see this up close, and it means it has immediate political import.
This guy did it, allegedly.
I have to say allegedly because he hasn't been convicted yet.
This guy, according to reports about his own confessions, did it.
And this means that if conspiracy theories gain traction, this guy could get off the hook.
He could get away with murder.
And when someone murders your friend, you don't want that person to get off the hook.
And for millions and millions of people who didn't know Charlie personally, but who might as well have, who felt like they knew him personally, who might have met him at some point, but who loved his leadership and his videos, that would feel like absolutely unacceptable injustice.
And so then why am I so angry at the Daily Mail?
A lot of other people have spread these conspiracy theories.
And I'll tell you why.
Because there are people who really believe them.
I know it's very tempting to say everyone's just being cynical about the Charlie conspiracy theories.
I think a lot of people sincerely believe the conspiracy theories.
And it's very difficult to persuade people out of that.
Okay.
And so for them, you just, I don't know, you hope you can persuade them.
You hope it, okay.
The Daily Mail obviously doesn't believe the theory.
The Daily Mail is just cynically promoting it to get clicks.
I was going to say to sell newspapers, they don't do that anymore, to get clicks.
That's what this is about.
The headline is a lie.
They admit that it's a lie in the first sentence.
And the stakes are very high for this.
My view of politics, as I've said many a time, is that politics is not debate club.
Some people, especially in the pundit class, but sometimes even in the elected class, especially among the pundits, they view politics as debate club.
They view politics as a matter of pure ideology, that we just speak into existence.
And they get very angry and impatient with politicians who are actually trying to do the practical work of politics, with the activists who are going out and whipping the votes, with the organizers and the coalition builders.
They get very angry with them because they're not so lily white and pure.
You know, the ideologues, they just get to speak their maxims into the air, and then they get to go back to their quiet, private little lives.
And they don't have to deal with the mess of it.
But I like the reality of politics.
I like politics as a lived action in a political community that is not totally pure, that is not perfectly ideological, that involves compromise and involves power struggles.
And sometimes you've got to win and you've got to beat the bad guy and you got to lock the bad guy.
And this would be a case of that.
A leftist murdered Charlie Kirk.
And then the mainstream left, to a distressingly large degree, celebrated it afterward.
And they need to be punished for that in order to dissuade them from continuing to kill conservatives.
They need to be punished as a matter of justice and a matter of deterrence.
It's bad enough when people are just confused about the facts or sincerely believe theories that are contrary to reality, that could undermine our political moment.
When people do it obviously, cynically, for purely selfish motives, just to get clicks, just to make money, justice be damned, safety be damned, political community be damned.
It's very disreputable, very, very irresponsible stuff from the Daily Mail.
I should not be terribly surprised, but really, I have a lot of emotional discipline, okay?
That's my Anglo side.
That's not my Sicilian side.
My Anglo side is stiff upper lip.
I have a lot of emotional discipline.
That one really, really got under my skin.
Speaking of tabloid journalism, a Washington Post columnist is weighing in on a wife who refuses to sleep with her husband, the husband now sleeping in a tent in the backyard.
We'll get to how we should think about that situation and our own marriages.
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Marital Problems in Tabloids 00:17:26
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Folks, in the latest episode of Michael and I sit down with former inmate Damon West, who was sentenced to 65 years in prison for burglary.
That's effectively a life sentence.
From surviving the brutal realities of prison life to the moment everything changed, Damon shares how he went from rock bottom to rebuilding his life with purpose and faith.
Here's a teaser.
I'm coming in off the wrecky hour that day, and Carlos is waiting for me, man.
He said, listen, man, when you go to the shower today, do you understand what's about to happen?
Either you're going to kill this guy, and they're going to give you another life sentence.
They could give you the death penalty for this one because you're waiting for this guy in the shower to kill him.
Or he's going to do something to you that you're going to want to be dead and you'll eventually die from anyway.
And he's HIV positive.
This guy is death in so many ways, man.
Biggest rapist in there, too, man.
Talking to God again.
Help me kill this guy.
Man, I'm getting the green light in my head, brother.
Michael, let's go.
Here he comes, man.
The doors open up.
There's a little half-solondo win.
I reach back.
I hit him as hard as I could.
Boom.
And I've crossed this line, man, where I'm ready to kill another human being and I don't want to stop.
I went berserk, man.
lost my mind.
Watch a full episode right now on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel for the ad-free version with extra footage that you will not see anywhere else.
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The Washington Post is now, now they're getting multimedia.
I don't know.
They took a lesson from the New York Times.
Maybe they took a lesson from the Daily Wire.
But they had a dear Abby sort of letter, an advice column that piqued my interest because it gets to probably the bedrock political problem that we have.
The bedrock political problem we face is not immigration.
It's not taxation.
It's not foreign policy.
The bedrock political problem we have is that we no longer know what marriage is.
And I'm not just blaming the gays.
That's a problem too, the fact that we think two fellas can get married or two ladies can get married.
That is a big problem.
It has a lot of bad consequences.
But that's not the bedrock problem.
The bedrock problem is even when we agree that marriage is between a man and a woman, we don't actually know what it is, as exemplified in this Washington Post question.
I stopped having sex with my husband and now he's sleeping in a tent in our backyard.
I'm embarrassed by what our neighbors might think.
How can I talk some sense into him?
Can we talk about the fact that the first response you have is that you're embarrassed about what the neighbors might think?
I think your conversation should not be about talking sense into your husband.
I think it should be talking to your husband.
I'm not going to say anything about the unilateral decision that you made to stop having sex with your husband because those are complicated decisions.
And once you've decided not to have sex, it is your decision.
But it seems like neither of you is talking to the other about how you feel.
I don't know where the neighbors come into that.
Okay.
Totally wrong.
Every perfectly wrong advice.
First of all, she says, I can't believe your first thought is what might the neighbors think?
Of course that's going to be your first thought.
You're having marital problems.
Your husband is doing this crazy stunt that is going to spook your neighbors.
He is doing that.
So your thought is, gosh, what are the neighbors going to think?
So he can actually get your attention to draw your minds to the fact that this is a big problem, that you won't sleep with your husband.
And then what does she say?
She says, look, when you decide not to sleep with your husband, that's your decision.
I know this is going to be a little controversial.
I know, look, when you say things that everybody knew five years ago, at this point, maybe 10 years ago now, when you say things everybody knew five minutes ago, but you say them today, it's controversial.
But it's not your decision.
Can I say that?
Whether or not to sleep with your husband or to sleep with your wife, that is not in fact entirely your decision.
When you get married, it's amazing that it needs to be said.
When you get married, you are agreeing to sleep with your spouse.
Save for the rarest of exceptions.
There is a very rare exception called a Josephite marriage.
Why is it named Josephite marriage after Saint Joseph, who Christians traditionally believe, and most Christians still do believe, Joseph and Mary had a chaste marriage.
They didn't have sex together.
I guess you're going to have a chaste marriage and still be sexually active, but they did not.
I actually did a little fun Twitter poll on this the other day.
I said, when it comes to the claim that Mary was perpetually a virgin, not just a virgin before the birth of Jesus, but afterward as well, do you agree with the Catholic Church's view on this?
Or do you agree with the view of the Protestant reformers like Luther, Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, later Protestants, John Wesley?
You know, what do you agree with?
The Catholic view or that Protestant view?
And the trick of the question, of course, was that they all agreed.
They all agreed with the perpetual virginity of Mary.
So anyway, I exempt Josephite marriages, and there have been some more recent examples of that too.
I would also say I exempt if there is a grave, an exceedingly grave reason.
For instance, here's an example.
Because of some medical complication, if doctors can say with great certainty that if a woman becomes pregnant, it will kill her, but the couple doesn't want to use artificial contraception because they view that as a sin.
There you could see a grave reason, a grave exception for not, but all of that digression to say, ladies, you have to sleep with your husband.
It's not just your choice.
Husbands, I don't know, maybe you don't want to sleep with your wife.
Maybe your wife, maybe you think she's ugly now.
I don't know why.
Maybe you just, she's annoying you.
Maybe, I don't know why, but you have to sleep with your wife too.
Spouses, you have to sleep together.
That is in fact the action that defines a marriage.
Some will be tempted to say, no, how dare you, Michael?
That's so reductive.
No, what defines a marriage is the emotional support.
Yeah, no, that's all a good of marriage.
No, what defines a marriage is we have dinner together.
So I lie, I have dinner with a lot of people.
No, what defines the marriage?
We sleep in the same bed.
I've shared bunks before.
You know what defines a marriage?
That thing that married people do, and you have to do it.
And the real reason that people resist this is not even feminism.
I mean, look, that's a big driver of it.
It's not even, it doesn't even have to do with marriage or sex.
The real reason that people reject that view in modernity is because it implies that we are not totally autonomous.
It implies that we have obligations.
I have to do things.
And what's so crazy is our culture, all societies, when they flourish, recognize that we have a lot of duties and obligations.
We have obligations to our country.
Maybe that's military service.
Maybe that's just other public service.
We have obligations to our community in giving alms and giving charity and philanthropy.
Let me ask you a question.
I'm preaching to the choir here, but do you give to charity?
How much of your income do you give to charity?
Do you Bible says you're supposed to give 10%?
Do you give 10%?
Most people don't.
Maybe you don't.
Probably not.
I don't know.
Depends on how you cut it.
Maybe you don't.
But do you give 5%?
Do you give 3%?
A lot of people don't give anything.
You have obligations to your employer.
And you have obligations to your spouse.
You've got to sleep with your spouse.
But people don't want to acknowledge that we have natural obligations as well as obligations that we enter into.
That is what cuts at the heart of liberalism.
But that is why liberalism cuts at the heart of the most basic political institution, which is why liberalism is like an acid that pours over all of society and which now turns society against itself.
That's why the liberal societies are suicidal.
No surprise the Washington Post got that wrong, but you should not get that wrong.
Get that one right.
Okay.
Speaking of moral teaching, this is a doozy.
Right out of the Ohio House, the Ohio House has just passed a law against indecent exposure to minors.
That's the good news.
The bad news?
Every single Democrat voted against it.
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Now, I didn't pick this comment.
The producers picked this comment.
We'll see if they picked a good one.
This is from Hard Boiled Entertainment.
It says, Michael, you and I both know Matt's going to do his next documentary as a trip with JD Vance to Area 51, et cetera.
I hope that that's Matt's next documentary because JD Vance can correct his mistaken view.
Because JD Vance, being an intelligent and educated and serious man, knows that aliens are much more likely to be demons than they are to be little green men.
Back to the moral teaching of the Ohio House.
We should all agree, whether you're religious or secular, whether you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Buddhist, we should all agree, shouldn't we, that indecent exposure to minors is wrong and should be outlawed, right?
Well, Democrats disagree.
The Ohio House just passed this law.
Every Democrat opposed it.
Why?
Because the law would possibly infringe on the LGBTQ movement.
Pride parades from coast to coast usually engage with indecent exposure to minors.
We've all seen the videos.
I don't need to play the videos.
We've seen over many years the pictures and the videos from the pride parades that are not in some seedy alley in a red light district.
They're on Main Street and there are kids at these parades.
We've seen the Drag Queen Story Hour shows.
We've seen kids at drag bars.
We've seen all that.
We know that men go into the women's bathroom because of LGBT rights, so-called, which often results in indecent exposure.
We know all these things.
And so the libs say, okay, between protecting kids from indecent exposure and promoting weird sex stuff, we're going to choose the weird sex stuff.
Chicago Bulls, the only thing you're not allowed to say.
You can go in there, blaspheme God all day.
The bulls will love you.
The minute you go in and say, actually, I object somewhat to creepy sex stuff, you're fired.
You're out.
This goes very, very deep.
So deep, in fact, that I would go so as far as to say that the sexualization of children is intrinsic to the left-wing political vision.
I don't think that's overstating it.
Here's a 1969 essay by the once and future Democrat presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders, been a Democrat legislator for 150 years, this close to being president multiple times.
Actually, he might have had a shot at it had the Democrats not stolen the nomination from him.
In a 1969 essay in the Vermont Freeman, he wrote, quote, In Vermont, at a state beach, a mother is reprimanded by authority for allowing her six-year-old daughter to go about without her diapers on.
Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each other's sexual organs and maybe even touch them.
Terrible thing.
If we raise children up like this, it will probably ruin the whole pornography business, not to mention the large segment of the general economy, which makes its money by playing on people's sexual frustrations.
So it's an ironic comment.
He's saying, oh, no, we could ruin the whole pornography business.
If what?
What is he actually advocating here?
What he's advocating is having kids run around naked so that they can see each other's sexual organs and touch them.
That's what he's saying.
That's what he's advocating for here.
Using not so subtle verbal irony, he's saying, I, politician Bernie Sanders, as a matter of my political ideology, want kids to run around naked and molest each other.
This got him in a little bit of trouble when he ran for president, but the media mostly brushed it under the rug.
This was not a one-off.
He was influenced by leading left-wing thinkers of his day, the clearest one being Wilhelm Reich, who had this idea that all the problems of the world are caused by people not having enough orgasms.
That was actually his theory.
And a lot of prominent leftists and left-wing intellectuals believe that.
But we do this to this day.
Even if the left is not as open about it as they were in 1969, what is coming out day at school about?
What is coming out day?
I remember, they had that when I was a kid.
Coming out day.
Coming out day is when kids say that they're gay.
They walk through a door and they decide to be gay or they tell everyone that they've previously said they're gay.
What's that about?
That's about sexualizing kids.
The phrase protect LGBT youth, protect trans youth.
What's that about?
That's about sexualizing kids.
That's about encouraging kids to think more and more about sex and to more aberrant forms of sex.
The left believes that exposing kids to weird sex stuff is good for them because it allows them to experiment and discover their true desires, which exist in some, I don't know, platonic realm, but which they have not yet discovered.
So like Plato's theory of knowledge, they need to discover, they need to relearn what they have forgotten.
They need to remember the hidden knowledge that they have forgotten, but which nonetheless pertains to them.
I don't think I'm overstating it.
I don't think I'm being hyperbolic or I'm attacking straw men or anything like that.
I mean, you can read the Bernie Sanders essay, you can look at the vote in the Ohio State House, and you can just see the implications of the left-wing ideology, which says that the purpose of life is self-actualization and self-control, and therefore we need to be authentically ourselves.
The traditional religious view is we need to conform ourselves to God, that we're born, you know, the creation is good, but it's a fallen world, and so there's some problems, and we need to conform ourselves to God, and in that way we will most perfectly be ourselves.
The liberal view says the opposite.
It says, forget about conforming yourself to God.
That's bad.
That's going to give you neuroses.
That's going to give you pathologies.
No, no, no.
You just need to be authentically yourself.
So you need to, especially when we're talking about sex, which is so central to human nature, you need to push the limits of sex.
You need to experiment in sex at a younger and younger age.
This is their words, not mine, to arrive at their true identities, their true identities, which year after year become more and more perverse.
Because when we try to conform ourselves to God, who is immutable and all good and all true and all beautiful, then we become more perfect and we become more free, actually.
But when we try to just be more like ourselves, you get caught in this kind of ouroboros, like a snake eating its own tail.
Whatever defects you have, they become more and more pronounced.
Unless you yourself are perfect.
And then becoming more and more like yourself, I suppose, will be good.
But assuming you're not perfect, that is actually what creates the neuros and the pathologies and all the problems.
As you can just see, we can see that anecdotally around us.
Trump's Ugly Presidential Library 00:08:07
Really creepy anyway, because the left doesn't want to admit this openly.
They used to when Bernie was writing.
They don't now.
But encouraging kids to do weird sex stuff is intrinsic to the left-wing political vision.
And if you have a problem with that, prove me wrong.
I haven't heard an argument against him.
Speaking of sex scandals, Eric Swalwell, the would-be future governor of California, he's actually probably not eligible legally to run for governor of California, as his fellow Democrat candidate Tom Steyer pointed out, because Eric Swalwell is not, in fact, a resident of California, and the California state constitution says you have to be.
He can sort that out himself.
The irony of Swalwell right now in his current job in the House of Representatives is that Swalwell sent a cease and desist to the FBI to stop the FBI from releasing documents about his involvement with the Chinese spy, Fang Fang.
Involvement here is a euphemism.
He knew, biblically, this Chinese spy, Fang Fang, and we've known about that for a long time.
He's tried to evade the questions.
Now the Washington Post is reporting the FBI is considering releasing some of these documents, and he is threatening to sue them to stop them from doing that.
Now, this is very strange because I seem to recall Eric Swalwell quite recently demanding that the FBI be more transparent, that the FBI release files pertaining to sex scandals and potential blackmail.
Not just that Eric Swalwell was calling on the FBI to release files, but he was calling to release files in specifically this case, in exactly the kind of situation that he's involved in with Fang Fang.
He tweeted out, you don't need a judge.
Trump has the files.
Why won't he release them now?
Swalwell, again, the American people deserve transparency, not redactions and cover-ups.
What happened to that transparency?
Now, whatever you think about the Epstein files, the whole Epstein political football was strutted out as a Democrat scandal.
And then somehow the Democrats made it a Republican scandal, but it really should be more of a Democrat scandal.
It's a hot potato, whatever.
In any case, it is way more responsible to release the files relating to Swalwell and Fang Fang.
It's just two people.
We know they had a relationship.
We know she's a Chinese spy.
This does not really threaten to ensnare innocent people here.
We know this all happened.
With the Epstein files, it seems like half the people in the country emailed Epstein at some point.
And some of them were crooks and scoundrels.
Some of them were perfectly innocent.
So if you're calling for transparency, it is much more reasonable to call for the transparency on the Swalwell Fang Fang files than the Epstein files, especially because this guy, who is clearly compromised by the Chinese, is not just a sitting federal legislator, but he's seeking to become the governor of California, one of the largest economies in the world.
Okay, before we go, I know, I know I'm running late.
I don't care.
Eric Trump, President Trump's son, has just released footage of what will become the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.
Do we have the B-roll?
Look at this.
So it's in Miami, giant.
It looks kind of like Freedom Tower in New York, which was the tower that replaced the World Trade Center.
So it's not that it's the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it's a stunning building in its size.
It's very New York.
It's very Trump, very 80s, very Wall Street.
It's just very, it's cool.
Big Trump name on the top.
And then I think they've got other facilities there where you could have nice cocktail parties, nice greenery, big American flag down the middle.
It's nice.
It's not Beaux-Art.
It's not Arnouveau or even Art Deco, but it's nice.
It's okay.
It's a nice building.
Good job.
They did a good job.
Very Trump.
I was hoping that it would not be in Miami or New York.
I was hoping that the Trump Library would become the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino in Atlantic City.
I thought that would be the funniest version of it, but they haven't.
Okay, it's going to be in Miami, and it's cool.
It's really nice.
Where's that Obama library?
They're almost done with that, right?
Do we have a picture of that?
Yeah.
So if you're only listening now, you got to go Google it if you haven't seen it already.
Barack Obama's library is almost done.
And it's, I can't describe to you how ugly it is.
It's brutalist and brutalism itself is very ugly, but it's particularly ugly brutalism.
It looks just like a big, ugly, asymmetrical, but still just flat slab, angular, flat slab in the middle of Chicago.
Somehow, despite all the degradation to Chicago in recent years, the Obama library makes Chicago uglier compared to the Trump building.
Red, white, and blue, flag, nice, 80s New York, business.
The reason that I point it out is not just to dunk on Obama.
The added perversity of the two presidential libraries is the presidents get to pick their library.
It's not like anyone forced this on them.
I'm sure President Trump, or at the very least, his family, was involved in designing it.
But knowing Trump, I bet he was pretty actively involved in designing the library himself.
So was Obama.
Obama picked that.
Obama picked the brutalism.
Nobody forced it on him.
I think of that meme, the meme of the guy going up to talk to the cute girl.
You know, he says, hi, could I buy you a drink?
And then the just big, fat, ugly friend walks up and says, oh, actually, she's not interested.
That's what it's like looking at the two presidential libraries.
Hi, I'd like to go visit a presidential library.
You're just trying to walk into the beautiful Trump library.
And then just the ugly Obama one comes around.
Oh, actually, he's not interested.
You can come to my library instead.
It's brutal.
It's awful.
The Obama one's brutalist, and it reflects the presidents.
The Trump Library is so Trump.
So Trump.
New York, big, bold, brash, glass, not the most ornamented, but it's there, makes a statement.
The Obama Library, it's just a bunch of ugly nothing.
It's a bunch of depressing, nihilistic nothing.
What was Obama?
He's just kind of nothing, just kind of ugly, not physically, fine-looking guy, just ugly, drab, spirit-discouraging nothing.
Reminds me of a line that I heard.
I think Drew Clavin might have told me this.
But it's become a cliché.
By 40, you've earned your face.
If you're ugly at 12 or even at 18, that's probably not your fault.
I don't know.
It's just genetics or circumstances in which you were born.
But if you're really ugly, if you look weathered and, I don't know, just twisted and bent by the time you're 40, that's on you.
You've lived that way.
You didn't have to live that way.
It's true with these buildings.
That building is Obama and that other building is Trump.
Okay.
I want to get to the controversy about President Trump's Air Force One, or sorry, about President Trump's new ballroom at the White House, which he just was discussing on Air Force One.
But I don't have time.
I got to get to it.
I got to get to it tomorrow.
Speaking of federal buildings, we're going to be heading on down to Cape Canaveral for the launch of Artemis II.
So if you're around there for the launch, I'll see you there.
If not, I'll see you here because we're going to have a very special episode of the Michael Knoll Show live from the launch of Artemis II.
The first time in 50 years we've gone back to the moon, or depending on your perspective, the first time we've ever Gone to the moon.
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