Ep. 502 - Mass (Media-Generated) Hysteria
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
175.87283
Summary
Coronavirus reaches the U.S., President Trump is playing it down, Democrats are playing it up, and no one can tell if this is much ado about nothing or if we are all going to die. We will examine the mass media generated hysteria, then, speaking of not knowing whether you are alive or dead, Joe Biden s presidential campaign gets some good poll news out of South Carolina, two different kinds of Republicans are voting for Bernie Sanders, and finally, The Mailbag.
Transcript
00:00:00.260
Coronavirus reaches the U.S. President Trump is playing it down. Democrats are playing it up.
00:00:06.700
And no one can tell if this is much ado about nothing or if we're all going to die.
00:00:11.120
We will examine the mass media generated hysteria.
00:00:15.000
Then, speaking of not knowing whether you're alive or dead,
00:00:18.260
Joe Biden's presidential campaign gets some good poll news out of South Carolina.
00:00:22.760
Two different kinds of Republicans are voting for Bernie Sanders.
00:00:26.520
And finally, the mailbag. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:00:38.820
We now have one confirmed case, and nobody knows what to think about this.
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Is this the end of the world, or is this not such a big deal?
00:00:48.280
The first case in the U.S. is in Solano County, California.
00:00:53.820
So that's in Northern California by San Francisco and Sacramento, that area.
00:00:57.600
The scary thing is, we have no idea how this individual got coronavirus.
00:01:04.880
This person did not recently travel to a foreign country.
00:01:07.620
This person did not recently have contact with someone who is known to have had the virus.
00:01:11.920
So that is rightly freaking a lot of people out.
00:01:16.660
So you've got people under quarantine in New York.
00:01:19.200
You've got half of Italy's regions now infected by this.
00:01:25.260
If you are invested in the stock market, this is not a very good day.
00:01:28.720
And so President Trump, first of all, is trying to assure everybody that everything is just fine.
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Well, President Trump says that the reason everybody's freaking out is because the Democrats are exploiting this and creating a panic for political advantage.
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What is your response to Speaker Pelosi who said earlier today, you don't know what you're talking about, about the coronavirus.
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I'm also wondering if you want to address critics who can't be trusted about what your administration is saying.
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I never thought that I would see that so quickly and so easily.
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And I think she's not thinking about the country.
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And instead of making a statement like that, where I've been beating her routinely at everything, instead of making a statement like that, she should be saying we have to work together because we have a big problem potentially.
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And maybe it's going to be a very little problem.
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I hope that it's going to be a very little problem.
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And there's no reason to panic because we have done so good.
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All they're trying to do is get a political advantage.
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I love that President Trump takes about 40 solid seconds of just insulting Nancy Pelosi before he gets to the actual question of whether coronavirus is a huge deal.
00:03:03.760
Still, I tend to agree with what President Trump is saying here, that the Democrats and the mainstream media, but I repeat myself, are using this as an opportunity to create a panic for political advantage.
00:03:17.480
I say this without looking at any of the science, without looking at any of the studies, or at least not very many of the studies about this.
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I say this simply because of the hysterical response that we've seen from the left and the media.
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A great example of this is in that same press conference where President Trump goes out there.
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He says he's going to address the coronavirus issue.
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The task force is going to be run by no less an authority than the vice president of the United States, right?
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Immediately, blue checkmark Twitter actually accused Mike Pence of spreading HIV.
00:04:03.180
When Mike was Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, they've established great health care.
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They have a great system there, a system that a lot of the other states have really looked to and changed their systems.
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And I think he's really very expert at the field.
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And what I've done is I'm going to be announcing exactly right now that I'm going to be putting our vice president, Mike Pence, in charge.
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Okay, a perfectly fine statement to make is obviously doing that to show that the administration is taking this seriously.
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And the left, I kid you not, is freaking out because they say Mike Pence spread HIV and AIDS throughout all of Indiana.
00:04:53.720
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How on earth can you accuse Mike Pence of spreading AIDS throughout Indiana?
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How do you take the most kind of basic statement of, hey, look, we're taking this really seriously.
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The vice president is going to be overseeing it.
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How do you take that into we're going to spread coronavirus like Mike Pence spread AIDS?
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By twisting a vote, by twisting a political position so beyond anything that's recognizable that all you can do is laugh at them.
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Mike Pence, when he was governor of Indiana, opposed a very liberal and stupid policy called needle exchanges.
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Needle exchanges are when you encourage heroin addicts to shoot up more drugs because you give them the needles so that they can shoot them up.
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This has been tried in a lot of cities around America.
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I mean, the reason that you when you're walking around certain cities like San Francisco, for instance, and you see needles on the street, it's because the government is just giving them to junkies.
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It's a horrible, horrible, indefensible policy.
00:07:07.360
So Mike Pence, like most other conservatives, says, yeah, it's a pretty bad policy.
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And what the left did is they said, OK, well, if you don't support giving needles to junkies, then you are personally responsible for the opioid crisis.
00:07:22.180
You're responsible for heroin addicts shooting up.
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And when they share needles, if one of them has HIV and it goes to the other one, you are responsible for that.
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Next, they're going to accuse him of killing Freddie Mercury.
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And yet that is the degree of mass hysteria, mass media hysteria that the left and the blue check marks and the usual suspects are willing to go to.
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So next in this press conference, already I'm pretty skeptical of the left here because they're willing to twist anything.
00:07:53.320
Next, President Trump is asked why he's treating coronavirus differently than he felt Ebola should have been treated in 2014.
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You also said it was a, quote, unquote, total joke to appoint someone to lead the Ebola response with, quote, zero experience in the medical field.
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So how does that square with what you're doing now?
00:08:15.660
Well, because it's a much different problem than Ebola.
00:08:18.440
Ebola, you disintegrated, especially at the beginning.
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But with Ebola, we were talking about it before.
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And this is a much different situation than Ebola.
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I mean, the imagery that Trump uses is often so vivid that it creates sort of disturbing images in your mind.
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I mean, it's obviously got a significantly higher mortality rate.
00:09:00.620
But still, right now, according to all the experts, the mortality rate is about 2%.
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Coronavirus is related to other similar viruses that we've seen.
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Again, not a good thing, but the whole world survived.
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That 2% mortality rate, by the way, is using data from the epicenter of this epidemic at mainland China.
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So, look, it's obviously very different than Ebola.
00:09:29.760
You've got to ask yourself, when you want to judge whether this is a panic created for political advantage,
00:09:35.060
or, really, we're all going to die, or, you know, it's something in the middle.
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What could President Trump have said or done that would have made the left happy?
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What could he have possibly said or done in that press conference that wouldn't have been twisted as the end of the world?
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They were all upset that he appointed Mike Pence, because Mike Pence, I guess, is the cause of AIDS or something,
00:10:03.380
Let's say he appointed someone with medical experience.
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Ben Carson, one of the most celebrated, renowned surgeons in the United States.
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First guy to successfully separate conjoined twins who were conjoined at the head.
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If they had appointed Ben Carson, can you just imagine the headlines today mocking Ben?
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You can remember the 2016 race, when they called him an idiot, when they called him a sellout, when they called him ignorant, right?
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They can do that to a major medical figure in the United States.
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What if President Trump shut down the airports?
00:10:43.160
Well, one time he did block people from coming in who were in very dangerous countries, countries with a high terrorism problem.
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And he was pilloried as a racist, a monster, a bigot.
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They're still talking about it on the campaign trail.
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What if President Trump had shut down the border?
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We're going to stop people who might be infected from coming in here.
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Well, I'll tell you how the left would have reacted because Elizabeth Warren already used this point.
00:11:06.400
And she used it to make the dumbest political argument that I've heard from the Democratic presidential field in, I don't know, 24 hours or something.
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If Trump had done anything, if he had said anything, if he had appointed anybody, the left would be freaking out and saying it was the worst thing he could have done.
00:12:50.040
One obvious thing President Trump could do, which he's been trying to do since 2016, is get control of the border.
00:12:56.480
Get control of who enters and exits the United States.
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Figure out, I mean, more importantly, figure out who's coming into the United States.
00:13:03.880
The reason that we need to be able to get control of the border is because, is exemplified when you've got a global pandemic like this.
00:13:13.360
So what's the argument the Democrats are making?
00:13:15.360
Elizabeth Warren at a town hall that apparently happened last night on CNN.
00:13:23.340
She said that the first thing she would do as president would be to take all the money that President Trump is spending on border security and put it toward researching coronavirus.
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I'm going to be introducing a plan tomorrow to take every dime that the president is now spending on his racist wall at our southern border and divert it to work on the coronavirus.
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When you've got a global pandemic going on, the first thing you want to do is open up all the borders and have no idea who's coming into your country.
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That's the kind of Harvard education that we need to get into the White House.
00:14:03.900
I don't know if coronavirus is a major problem.
00:14:09.840
The major problem is that we can't trust the media to tell us.
00:14:16.340
We do not know right now if coronavirus is the second coming or a later coming of the bubonic plague or if it's just like the seasonal flu or cold or something.
00:14:28.780
We don't know that because our press is so corrupt.
00:14:33.060
Our press is so blindly opposed to this president that we cannot trust them to blow up something which is not a big deal into a global panic to send markets tanking all because they hate this president.
00:14:49.620
James O'Keefe from Project Veritas just busted an ABC reporter for admitting that he's a socialist, right?
00:15:03.260
There's nothing really shocking about that kind of a report.
00:15:09.660
But then they admit it and you think, oh, that's right.
00:15:16.460
CNN's Jim Acosta demonstrated this principle just the other day when he flat-out insulted the president at a news conference.
00:15:26.180
Just wanted to follow up on my colleague's question about Russian interference.
00:15:30.160
Can you pledge to the American people that you will not accept any foreign assistance in the upcoming election?
00:15:37.000
And on this idea of a purge in your administration, there was recently the departure of your acting DNI, Joseph McGuire.
00:15:44.980
You replaced him with your ambassador to Germany, Rick Grinnell.
00:15:48.620
Some of your critics have pointed out that Ambassador Grinnell has no intelligence experience.
00:15:55.080
How can you justify to the American people having an acting DNI with no intelligence experience?
00:16:10.220
But you've got this guy, Richard Grinnell, who is a former ambassador to Germany.
00:16:15.100
He was, I think, the longest-serving spokesman ever at the UN.
00:16:19.060
And then he's in this acting position as the top spy.
00:16:24.920
Then President Trump turns it, right, to reveal, hold on, this isn't a fair question.
00:16:38.000
And I haven't been given help from any country.
00:16:40.740
And if you see what CNN, your wonderful network, said, I guess they apologized in a way for,
00:16:49.840
didn't they apologize for the fact that they said certain things that weren't true?
00:16:59.140
Trump knows that there's no win by explaining why his acting DNI is a real cool guy.
00:17:09.240
Acosta has set up this sort of unfair situation where Trump's got to defend a guy who's got an
00:17:21.400
He says, oh, you know, you at your wonderful network.
00:17:25.020
And he's needling Acosta, and he's pushing Acosta to answer a question.
00:17:32.360
Mr. President, I think our record on delivering the truth is a lot better than yours sometimes,
00:17:39.020
Your record is so bad, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
00:17:41.420
I'm not ashamed of anything, and our organization is not ashamed, sir.
00:17:43.080
You probably have the worst record in the history of broadcasting.
00:17:46.600
As far as McGuire is concerned, he's a terrific guy.
00:17:51.240
But, you know, on March 11th, his time ended anyway, so his time came up.
00:17:55.220
So we would have had to, by statute, we would have had to change him anyway.
00:17:59.200
Will your new DNI have experience in the intelligence field?
00:18:02.460
Yes, in fact, we're talking to five different people right now.
00:18:05.480
I think all people that you know, all people that you respect, and I'll make a decision
00:18:18.620
So he needles him, he's pushing him, he's pushing him, and then Jim Acosta completely
00:18:30.460
He was trying to get Jim Acosta to show his corruption and bias.
00:18:37.760
It is absolutely, no matter what the president says, no matter what the politician that you're
00:18:41.800
interviewing says, it is absolutely not the role of the reporter to start insulting
00:18:48.620
Oh, actually, we have a much better record on truth than you do, you idiot.
00:18:58.360
Chris, Chris Wallace at Fox News, who is, I believe he is a Democrat.
00:19:02.860
He said off the record, you know, this has been reported in some of the press, that he was
00:19:10.020
I mean, what a humiliating answer for the journalistic profession from Jim Acosta there to just start
00:19:19.360
So what President Trump does, starts out, it's a sort of fair question.
00:19:23.580
Then Jim Acosta reveals that he's just an anti-Trump operative.
00:19:27.640
And then at the end, you saw President Trump turns it again and starts giving a real answer.
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He says, no, you know, look, but we're going to interview some good people.
00:19:34.280
We got all people I think you're really going to like.
00:19:36.080
So on the bookends, the beginning and the end of Trump's performance look really good.
00:19:40.500
And in the middle, what President Trump did was get the press to reveal how much they
00:19:46.180
That tarnishes their credibility, and it's their fault that they're doing it.
00:19:52.000
So now we can't even know if we're all going to die from coronavirus or if it's really no
00:19:57.560
Moving on to the 2020 race, we also don't really know what's going on there because we're
00:20:07.860
I mean, he's pretty much just muttering to himself on stage at the last debate.
00:20:11.180
And yet, all hope might not be lost for Joe because there is a new poll that's come out
00:20:21.280
Joe Biden, according to this poll, has an 18-point lead in South Carolina.
00:20:27.360
The numbers are Biden, 35 percent, Steyer, 17 percent.
00:20:35.820
Sanders, 13 percent, Warren and Buttigieg, 8 percent, Klobuchar, 4 percent.
00:20:44.860
That is a very sizable lead for Joe Biden, which means that Biden actually might be back
00:20:52.500
So right now, after his very poor debate performances, it looks as though his national
00:20:57.580
polls have stalled out or they've actually begun to reverse themselves.
00:21:00.780
In California right now, Bloomberg is back down at 11 percent.
00:21:10.200
That's not enough to take him to the nomination.
00:21:12.760
So Bernie, or Biden rather, might have the moderate lane.
00:21:16.420
This is causing a lot of Republicans to vote for Bernie Sanders.
00:21:20.700
And I don't mean they're just rooting for Bernie Sanders.
00:21:23.820
I mean, they are going out in the open primaries where Republicans can vote for Democrats and
00:21:30.440
There was actually a video that was leaked from some Trump supporters that came out yesterday.
00:21:34.420
The never Trump Republicans are all upset about this.
00:21:37.160
This came out yesterday where these mischievous Republicans were arguing all of their for all
00:21:43.900
of their fellow Republicans to go out and vote for Bernie in the nomination so that
00:21:58.860
South Carolina Republicans have waited since 2016 to vote again for President Trump.
00:22:04.180
With no Republican primary in South Carolina, voters will have to wait until November to
00:22:10.480
But there's still a way South Carolina Republicans can support President Trump.
00:22:14.580
Even after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, Joe Biden is still the favorite in South Carolina.
00:22:19.560
We all know that the DNC and the Democrat establishment do not want the independent
00:22:26.760
We're asking South Carolina Republicans to show their support for President Trump by crossing
00:22:31.360
over and voting in the Democratic primary for Senator Bernie Sanders.
00:22:35.500
We feel this may help move the needle in closing our primaries in South Carolina.
00:22:39.040
Now, help us help President Trump by going to your polling location on Saturday, February
00:22:44.060
29th and voting for independent Bernie Sanders to be the Democrat nominee.
00:22:53.200
I've been telling you to do exactly the same thing, and I'm so glad that they are backing
00:22:58.040
Some of the never-Trump Republicans, Bill Kristol in particular was posting this around,
00:23:03.160
were saying that this is terrible, nefarious, it's a smoking gun.
00:23:13.060
Whether or not it actually affects elections, I'm a little more skeptical of that.
00:23:17.040
It's hard enough to get people to come out and vote for their own party to get them to
00:23:22.720
I don't think it actually works that much, but I understand why these Republicans want
00:23:27.120
Bernie to get the nomination, because I do think increasingly it's likely that Trump will
00:23:34.620
Now, if the economy totally tanks, I guess it's anybody's ballgame.
00:23:37.980
So there is some risk, especially as coronavirus is going around.
00:23:41.020
But even so, I don't think that America is ready to vote for a very elderly socialist.
00:23:48.180
So that's the one kind of Republican that is voting for Bernie Sanders.
00:23:53.620
There is another kind of Republican voting for Bernie Sanders.
00:23:56.880
And if you think that the logic of those Tea Party activists is a little kooky, just wait
00:24:02.680
until you hear the illogic of the never-Trump Republicans.
00:24:05.280
There is an op-ed right now in the Washington Post by Joe Walsh.
00:24:21.620
He was a major, he actually supported Trump in 2016.
00:24:24.880
Then he became sort of the never-Trump Republican.
00:24:34.460
I'm no fan of Bernie Sanders, but never-Trump means never-Trump.
00:24:40.360
Sorry, GOP outcasts, but sometimes Trump just doesn't cut it.
00:24:45.420
Now, Joe, I actually want to read right below the byline.
00:24:50.580
It says, Joe Walsh is a former Illinois congressman and the author of F, they spell it all out,
00:24:55.740
silence, calling Trump out for the cultish, moronic, authoritarian con man he is.
00:25:01.480
They say, I hate that this effing Trump is so effing vulgar.
00:25:07.240
I hate that he's such a name-calling moron jerk.
00:25:10.980
You know, you're sort of doing the things you're accusing him of doing.
00:25:16.940
And it shows you the moral error that is at the heart, not just of never-Trump,
00:25:21.880
but of any political position that backs you into an untenable corner.
00:25:27.220
This isn't complicated. Never-Trump has always been a straightforward concept.
00:25:34.600
But with Senator Bernie Sanders moving ahead of the pack as the clear frontrunner in this year's Democratic presidential primaries,
00:25:39.820
some of my Republican and ex-Republican brethren have started implying that what never-Trump actually meant was something more like,
00:25:46.560
Fingers crossed, I really, really hope not Trump, but I guess sometimes Trump,
00:25:50.960
if Democrats wind up nominating a self-described Democratic socialist.
00:25:56.280
When I finally came around to saying never-Trump, I meant it.
00:26:02.000
Never-Trump means that you still believe in the Constitution.
00:26:05.720
It means you knew what Benjamin Franklin meant when he warned that we Americans have been blessed with a republic if you can keep it.
00:26:12.480
It means you recognize that Trump is enough of a threat to our founding principles that you won't vote for him under any circumstances.
00:26:19.340
And, at least to me, it also means you'll suck it up and support his Democrat opponent, no matter who that is.
00:26:27.620
It means you made a mistake and you're too prideful to admit it.
00:26:33.860
I'm not saying that's what never-Trump meant in 2016.
00:26:36.780
There were a lot of open questions about President Trump.
00:26:39.140
But today, never-Trump means that you made a mistake, you made a miscalculation,
00:26:46.020
circumstances were not as you predicted and they actually worked out pretty well,
00:26:50.060
but you have too much pride to admit that you were wrong.
00:26:55.260
Never-Trump means you still believe in the Constitution.
00:26:58.680
First of all, the never-Trump forces have been consistently undermining the Constitution
00:27:03.060
since before the 2016 election to try to get that guy removed from office, extra-constitutionally.
00:27:11.960
Do you think that Benjamin Franklin would prefer an America-hating, America-blaming socialist like
00:27:23.060
What, because Donald Trump has sort of boorish behavior?
00:27:30.980
He's a little bit of a libertine sometimes, okay?
00:27:35.340
It means you won't vote under any circumstances.
00:27:43.680
I hate to break it to you, but if you're really never Trump, then you know there's no
00:27:51.560
Because I thought the good argument for not voting for Trump if you're a conservative in 2016
00:27:56.180
was that you thought he would be more left-wing than Hillary Clinton.
00:28:08.380
He had described himself as very, very pro-choice.
00:28:11.320
There was a real fear that he was this left-wing guy and that if you had a left-wing guy take
00:28:16.200
over the Republican Party, that would be very bad and so we don't want to do that.
00:28:23.180
But if the only argument for never Trump is that you don't like the mean tweets, you
00:28:31.380
think he doesn't talk right, you think he's a little too boorish, and then you're willing
00:28:37.700
to vote for a socialist instead, you have completely lost the narrative.
00:28:41.320
You have completely lost the point of politics.
00:28:43.100
It has just become for you about manners, about a kind of performance, but it's not about the
00:28:50.140
Trump has been the most conservative president, not only in my lifetime, probably the most
00:29:00.140
If you're willing to vote for a socialist over that, were you ever a conservative in the
00:29:05.600
Maybe you were, but certainly what has happened to you is you have been so warped by pride
00:29:10.980
that your view of politics is now utterly unreliable.
00:29:14.920
Look, just very quickly, before we get to the mailbag, there was a progressive think
00:29:20.460
tanks analysis that just came out over Bernie's plans.
00:29:24.560
This is, it's actually called the Progressive Policy Institute.
00:29:28.220
Bernie's plans would cost over 10 years, you know how much?
00:29:41.960
This would double the size of the government, of the federal government.
00:29:47.260
It would cost $15 trillion more over 10 years than the next most radical candidate, which
00:29:52.460
is Elizabeth Warren, and it would cost $42 trillion more than the third most expensive
00:30:02.680
Now, I actually don't think that kind of accounting matters all that much, because I think for most
00:30:09.300
people, you hear a big number and you say, all big numbers are the same.
00:30:16.360
You don't win arguments from bean counting, especially not to beat a guy like Bernie Sanders,
00:30:22.960
Okay, you've got to make the moral arguments yourself.
00:30:25.900
Elizabeth Warren made this mistake the other night.
00:30:27.560
She said, look, I love Bernie's policies, but I'm going to implement them better.
00:30:36.900
That doesn't rouse you and send you to the polls.
00:30:42.180
All right, the argument against socialism has to be moral.
00:30:46.000
And if you're, if you're just making arguments from bean counting or efficiency, if you're
00:30:49.880
making arguments because of how you don't like the guy's tweets, you've lost the narrative
00:30:57.920
But first I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube first, before we go, go buy Matt
00:31:08.000
You've got Christians being martyred in the Middle East.
00:31:10.340
You've got Christians in America who aren't even willing to voice their opinion because
00:31:13.940
they're afraid of not getting invited to a few parties or something.
00:31:19.040
You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere that you get fine, fine conservative
00:31:27.040
We will be with you smoking stogies, drinking too much whiskey and following the results
00:31:35.540
We will be there and set your clock for many, many hours.
00:31:40.620
And then by the way, on leap day, which comes around once every four years, head over to
00:31:46.480
We have got a very, very special deal coming for you.
00:31:49.280
So you're not going to want to miss that because if you miss it, it's going to take another
00:31:53.520
And by then I think global warming will have done us in.
00:31:55.900
And there'll be a lot of, there'll be a lot of world problems.
00:32:17.260
Dear Mr. Knowles, what is the difference between love and infatuation?
00:32:26.700
This is something that people no longer understand because we use stupid slogans like love is
00:32:31.680
love as though that tells us anything about politics or love or philosophy or ourselves.
00:32:36.760
There is a big difference between love and infatuation.
00:32:41.260
Infatuation, another term for that would be sentimentality.
00:32:44.680
It's like, it's like that real sugary, Hallmark, Cardi kind of love.
00:33:00.600
So we all knew this person when we were in school.
00:33:03.600
There was a girl who just always needed to have a boyfriend.
00:33:06.780
And whatever boyfriend she had was always like the greatest guy in the world.
00:33:15.180
And then they would break up and she'd get a new boyfriend.
00:33:16.740
And then the new boyfriend was exactly the same thing.
00:33:18.780
It's because with infatuation, what you are doing is you are really in love with the idea
00:33:25.960
You are really in love with an ideal that you have created in your own mind of the perfect
00:33:31.740
And then whether or not the person in reality matches up to that person, you are superimposing
00:33:43.300
You are simply in love with your own self-generated idea.
00:33:48.600
Love, true love, is willing the good of the other person.
00:33:55.180
True love is staring the other person in the face, seeing them for who they are in reality
00:34:06.840
Make sure that you are really loving the other person.
00:34:11.000
And it's not just the images that you're putting on that person.
00:34:14.220
And one way to know that, to know the difference, is to analyze other relationships that you've
00:34:21.660
If they've all had the same kind of character, if you've all kind of viewed the person in
00:34:26.120
exactly the same way, you might be dealing with infatuation.
00:34:28.860
But if you really like the other guy, then it's probably love.
00:34:35.480
One theme of your show is how the modern left rejects the concept of objective morality.
00:34:40.400
I've noticed that one's rejection of objective morality quickly follows their rejection of
00:34:44.760
So my question for you is, can one believe in objective morality without believing in God?
00:34:51.280
Moreover, how can we as conservatives argue for objective morality without tracing said morality
00:34:59.500
One can believe in objective morality without God.
00:35:05.300
You know, we believe all sorts of things that don't make a whole lot of sense.
00:35:11.620
There cannot be objective morality without God.
00:35:15.160
Actually, one of the arguments for God's existence is the argument from morality.
00:35:19.320
Very simply, if morality is objective and absolute, which is what we mean when we say morality
00:35:34.140
If you're an atheist, a great many atheists are materialists.
00:35:37.500
So they'd say everything that we talk about that really matters to us, love, hopes, dreams,
00:35:45.000
They're all just something we're fooling ourselves with.
00:35:52.380
And that's what's giving us this impression of a metaphysical reality.
00:35:56.540
If that's the kind of atheism we're talking about, then morality can't exist at all.
00:36:07.880
Now, if you're the sort of atheist who says, you know, hey, man, I'm not religious, but
00:36:12.160
I'm spiritual or something like that, some kind of vague notion of spirituality, which
00:36:17.360
usually just means I'm not that interested in God, but I'm really interested in myself.
00:36:20.980
If you've got that kind of idea, okay, listen, I don't mean to make fun of this.
00:36:25.760
I actually held that view myself once when I was a teenager.
00:36:28.620
But if you have that idea, then I guess a morality could exist.
00:36:35.620
Like the idea that through evolution, human beings have for some reason developed these
00:36:42.040
highly sophisticated systems of morality, which often encourage us to sacrifice ourselves,
00:36:47.200
which doesn't seem to bode very well for evolution, but it's evolved somehow.
00:36:51.520
And anyway, it's always changing because humans are always evolving.
00:36:55.520
That is a morality, but that is not an objective, absolute morality, right?
00:37:02.920
If we all came together and came up with a different idea, then that would be the morality.
00:37:06.500
If you want the objective, absolute morality, which is all anybody is referring to when
00:37:15.360
Hey, Michael, who is fact-checking these debate moderators?
00:37:18.620
I feel like there was a lot of misinformation directed into the questions.
00:37:22.300
The one that stood out to me was the African-Americans earning 73 cents on the dollar compared to white
00:37:31.080
These moderators present the candidates, these statistics as, and the candidates present these
00:37:41.500
That statistic, the 73 cents on the dollar that black Americans are in compared to white
00:37:47.160
Americans, I looked this one up and it is a real statistic.
00:37:53.820
You see it posted around from fairly reputable sources.
00:37:57.080
The problem with the moderators and the candidates is not that they're presenting these statistics.
00:38:03.040
The problem is they're not explaining these statistics.
00:38:06.480
So they present the statistics without context and then they use that to imply that the reason
00:38:13.580
that there's this wage gap is because of systemic racism, institutionalized racism, right?
00:38:20.920
The reason that there's that wage gap is not explained primarily by race.
00:38:25.420
It's explained primarily by education and experience in the workforce.
00:38:36.480
But the real factor here is you've got different educational attainment, you've got different
00:38:41.100
schools, you've got different time in the workforce, you've got different caliber of
00:38:48.040
And so when you wash all of that out, if you look at it primarily through the lens of race,
00:38:56.680
There's a similar wage gap between men and women, men of all races and women of all races.
00:39:00.400
And they say women earn 75 cents on the dollar that men do, which is true until you correct
00:39:10.700
When you correct for that, just like the racial wage gap, the wage gap disappears.
00:39:15.280
Now, obviously, the Democrats are not going to present that context because they want to
00:39:19.320
race hustle and sex hustle to try to divide Americans and get their votes.
00:39:23.620
And the moderators are not going to correct them on it because the moderators are Democrats
00:39:32.300
Dear most revered and austere religious podcaster, I love your shows and have two questions.
00:39:38.500
First, what are you listening to in your earpiece during the Michael Knowles show?
00:39:43.720
Secondly, what do you and Ted Cruz talk about on verdict when the cameras and microphones
00:39:51.940
So in my earpiece during the show, I'm listening to Hall of Notes.
00:39:55.880
And when I'm speaking to Ted Cruz during verdict and the cameras are off and the microphones
00:40:02.380
are off, we're talking about what's really going on at Area 51.
00:40:17.400
Lewis's work, Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, and The Great Divorce.
00:40:20.300
And I'm currently reading Chesterton's Orthodoxy.
00:40:23.880
After this, I'm looking to delve into Dante's Divine Comedy.
00:40:28.580
However, I'm not sure which translation of Dante to pick up.
00:40:36.200
I would recommend, and I'm only giving this out secondhand, the John Chardy translation.
00:40:41.920
I have not read a translation of it because when I was growing up, for some reason, I thought
00:40:47.740
it would be a good idea to learn Italian, which is possibly the least practically useful language
00:40:55.020
I didn't learn a language that could actually get me around, you know, day to day.
00:41:00.620
But I would recommend the Chardy because friends of mine who have read both say the Chardy
00:41:06.560
From Chris, hello, Mr. Knowles, the more science and medicine progressive progresses, the more
00:41:13.200
we realize our thoughts and sometimes our actions are a function of hormones and our
00:41:19.440
I know we have the ability to overcome these chemicals and hormones, but I can't quite wrap
00:41:23.920
my brain around reconciling that with the idea of free will.
00:41:33.560
Listen to what you wrote, though, in that question.
00:41:35.920
The question that you wrote actually kind of gives away the misunderstanding here.
00:41:40.420
You said, I can't quite wrap my brain around it.
00:41:44.000
Now, the usual phrase is, I can't quite wrap my mind around it.
00:41:47.500
And the difference is the brain is a physical organ and the mind is your sort of intellectual
00:41:53.660
But what you're saying is, yeah, I'm kind of doubting that the metaphysical exists.
00:41:57.180
I think we're all just a product of our chemicals.
00:42:02.500
I don't think that medical science shows us that our choices are merely or primarily the
00:42:09.540
effect of physical processes that are going on.
00:42:13.800
If you've ever learned anything at all, you know that learning is not the effect of merely
00:42:21.760
So the biggest transformations that we could possibly undergo in our minds or our brains,
00:42:32.400
So you've got one idea and then something new happens and you change it.
00:42:36.160
I mean, it can have major effects on how you live your life.
00:42:39.180
If you're a real decadent guy and you're going out to the strip club every night and getting
00:42:42.920
bottle service and then you change your mind, you read a book, you read the Bible and you say,
00:42:48.020
oh my gosh, I've got to go become a monk in the hills, you have just on a very physical
00:42:52.200
level completely changed the way that your life is going to go.
00:42:56.800
It was caused by an intellectual and metaphysical process, right?
00:43:05.040
The reason people get confused about this is because the only thing we can see is the
00:43:10.060
So they're confusing correlation for causation.
00:43:12.780
They're saying, because I can see that there is a physical change here, the physical has
00:43:19.220
But actually, we are not merely our bodies and we're also not merely our spirits.
00:43:24.320
That's another ancient heresy that was condemned a long time ago.
00:43:29.560
It's actually coming back now in the form of transgenderism, which tells you that your
00:43:32.900
body has no bearing on who you are and really you're just a secret invisible being and you've
00:43:38.700
got to change your body to get in line with that.
00:43:45.620
We're all in this one human unity and we do have free will.
00:43:51.520
It's not something that you can see, but you can't see most of the things that matter
00:44:00.200
Dear Michael, what would you recommend for my first cigar?
00:44:19.220
If I were you, you're around here, I would start out with something like the Oliva Series
00:44:24.640
O or the Cusano 18 or it's a cigar that are a little bit more mild, kind of get you into
00:44:31.120
it and then you can graduate to more intense flavor profiles.
00:44:36.840
We have so much more to get to, but I can't because I've got to run over to CPAC.
00:44:43.020
That's why I'm broadcasting from this hotel room, because Senator Ted Cruz and I are going
00:44:47.360
to be doing an episode of Verdict live at CPAC with the chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel of
00:45:00.200
So if you're in D.C., head on over and say hello.
00:45:11.320
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
00:45:16.560
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends
00:45:21.940
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
00:45:26.980
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show,
00:45:31.620
The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
00:45:34.540
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies and directed by Mike Joyner.
00:45:41.800
Supervising producers, Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
00:45:59.320
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:46:04.540
If you prefer facts over feelings, aren't offended by the brutal truth, and you can
00:46:08.160
still laugh at the insanity filling our national news cycle, well, tune in to The Ben Shapiro
00:46:15.140
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