Ep. 1015 - Jimmy Kimmel's Tears Don't Stop Bad People
Episode Stats
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Summary
The doors to the Texas elementary school were unlocked, and there was no armed guard on duty anywhere on the school premises. Had even just one of those circumstances been different, could the shooter have been stopped? And what would that have done to prevent the massacre?
Transcript
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New facts are emerging out of the Texas elementary school where that awful shooting took place
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this week. And these new facts somehow make the whole thing even more horrible
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because they suggest that the horror might have been prevented. We're talking about simple facts
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here. The doors to the school were unlocked. The killer entered through an unmonitored door in the
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back. There was no armed guard on duty anywhere on the school premises. Had even just those
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circumstances been different? Of course, it's no guarantee that the shooter would have been stopped
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or that the death toll would have been lower. But it certainly would have reduced the likelihood
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that the shooter could have done what he did. And it's precisely these sorts of facts that activists
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in the media are trying to deny. I say this tonight with the hope, not with an expectation,
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but with the hope that people like Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott and John Cornyn, people who were elected
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by Texans, will actually listen to it. Instead of going right to gun control laws don't work and we
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need armed teachers and guards at schools. If your solution to children being massacred is armed guards,
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you haven't been paying attention to what's going on. There was an armed guard in Buffalo. There was an
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armed guard in Parkland. There was an armed guard in Uvalde. They had armed guards.
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So what Jimmy Kimmel just said is not true. It's not true with regard to this shooting that we just
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saw in Texas. I'm not even saying he's lying. He probably just doesn't know. But that falsehood,
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and for some people, that lie is essential to the agenda. And the agenda here is not so much
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about improving the safety of schools as it is about enacting the mostly unrelated gun control
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laws that liberals have wanted for decades. All the very same laws that, as even the Washington
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Post admits, wouldn't have stopped the mass shootings. There are lots of gun laws that Democrats
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want and that Republicans and voters more broadly, actually, will never let them pass.
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For sure, there are. There are plenty of gun laws that Republicans want that Democrats won't let
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them pass. That's true too. But then there are really basic laws that theoretically could be passed
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that would go a long way toward protecting schools, funding armed guards, upgrading school buildings to
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better secure the doors. These are not particularly ideological reforms. These are not an opportunity to
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score big partisan points. These are just basic safety precautions to protect schools, which is why
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we are almost certainly not going to get them. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday is from BLD, who says,
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Not everything has to be an extreme partisan fight. Practically speaking, I guess it does
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these days. But it shouldn't have to be a big partisan fight. There are some really basic
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things about society that we can all agree on. I would hope, at least until very recently,
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we could all agree on. A leftist would not want to use this tumbler to drink delicious tears or
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sparkling water or whatever you're drinking. They wouldn't want to use this tumbler because it
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says leftist tears. Just like I wouldn't want to use a tumbler that says conservative tears.
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But at the very least, we should both be able to agree that you should drink sparkling water out of
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a cup rather than out of, I don't know, a kazoo. There are basic facts about reality that we should
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all be able to agree on that don't necessarily need to have a Republican color or a Democrat color or
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a left or right. Not everything has to be about ideology. The reason it feels like it does is
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because the left's political program is about upending society. The left's political program
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is essentially revolutionary. That's been true not just for the past 20 years. It's been true
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going back to the French Revolution. It's been true further back than that. That we've got to remake
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the whole world anew. And all of the inherited wisdom of the past, it's not wisdom at all. It's
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terrible. It's awful. It's bigoted. It's making us all miserable. We've got to get rid of it. But
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there is a lot of wisdom in the past. We actually have learned things over the history of humanity,
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really basic things. It doesn't necessarily need to be about rights and entitlement and high-minded
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philosophy. It can just be, hey, lock the doors. Hey, lock the doors when you want to stay safe.
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Hey, have single points of entry. Hey, have people whose job it is to protect other people when they're
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a soft target. Really, really simple stuff. There was an interview in Chicago. It took place yesterday
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or the day before. This was conducted by a Fox affiliate in Chicago. So not Fox News, the center
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right news channel, but just a regular old network affiliate. They're conducting the interview on the
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street about guns in Chicago. During the interview, some dude comes out and brandishes a pistol at
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the cameraman. Around seven o'clock this morning at the corner of Clark and Hubbard, while our reporter
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was in the middle of a live report about gun violence in Chicago, a man walked up and pointed what
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appeared to be a firearm at our crew. Right now, police are calling this man a person of interest,
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accused of aggravated assault with a firearm. This guy who brandished the gun on the street
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at the reporter, he doesn't look like he's been living on the street for the past two years. He
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doesn't look like necessarily some schizophrenic, drug addicted, derelict roaming the streets.
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He's fairly well-dressed. He seems fairly clean. He doesn't seem sane in that no sane person should be
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brandishing a weapon on the street. But really, he just seems, he seems bold. He seems like he
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knows there aren't going to be any consequences for this kind of behavior. And why? Because there
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won't be. Because throughout many of our major cities, run by leftists, people are not arrested
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for crimes. Because for the past two years, the left has run on defunding the police and abolishing
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police departments and installing far-left DAs that just won't prosecute people for crime.
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And then during COVID, they emptied out the jails. And they just say, they're sending a message to
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the criminals, hey, do whatever you want. We're not going to stop you. So is it any wonder that
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people like this are emboldened in Chicago? Do you know what would stop this kind of behavior?
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It doesn't need to be some pie in the sky, really extremely sophisticated ideological thing.
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Arrest the criminals. Arrest him. That dude should be nabbed immediately. He should go to jail for a long
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time. He should be punished. Not just a little plea deal slap on the hand. Well, society failed
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him. Well, he had a tough upbringing. And let's just divert him into a nice special non-profit
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program. No, punish him. He's a bad guy. And if you don't want him to remain a bad guy,
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if you want him to become a better guy, then punish him. Enforce basic laws. Is that so much to ask?
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These days, I guess it is. Because none of the people now who are clamoring, do something,
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do something, do something, none of them seem to care at all about fixing the problems that
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they're claiming to want to fix. They're all just pushing the same old ideological agenda
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that they were pushing 10 months ago, two years ago, 10 years ago. Joe Biden now has gone off and
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made this entire effort, which should be about protecting schools, into an effort to ban AR-15.
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No one needs an AR-15, something designed for no other purpose, none, other than to kill human
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beings. There's no other rationale for its existence than to kill them as quickly and as brutally as
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possible. It's not exactly true because you can kill squirrels with an AR-15. I think you could even
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kill deer, though it wouldn't be particularly humane. But to his, it's also, AR-15s are not
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the quickest way to kill people because they're not, contrary to what the left would have you
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believe, they're not fully automatic weapons. They're not assault rifles. A fully automatic
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weapon, you pull the trigger and a spray of bullets comes out. A semi-automatic weapon, you pull the
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trigger, one bullet comes out, you pull the trigger again, another bullet comes out. So what he's saying
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technically is not true. But to his broader point, he says, these guns kill people. And he's implying
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that that's a bad thing for guns to do. That is the purpose of guns. That is the purpose of the
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Second Amendment. That is the purpose of the right to self-defense, is that if someone comes to attack
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you, you have the right to defend yourself. That's what they're for. People are not buying these guns
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to go hunt squirrels. And he's insinuating that this is a bad thing. What is his solution? What is
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his solution? If he's saying that the problem with the AR-15 is they're designed to kill people, then that
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means we have to get rid of all the guns. But not just the AR-15s, handguns are designed to kill people.
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In fact, handguns are much more directly designed to kill people than any of the rifles are, or any of
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the shotguns are. So then you have to get rid of all the guns. Are you going to do that, Joe Biden?
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No, you'd have to repeal the Second Amendment. Are you going to do that? No, you can't do that.
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And most people don't want you to do that. So what are you going to do? Are you going to pass laws
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in contravention of the Second Amendment? Are you going to try to change the interpretation of the
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Second Amendment? You're going to just confiscate all the guns without repealing the Second Amendment?
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There are more guns than people in America. So what is the practical effect of what he's proposing?
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Constitutionally, it's incoherent. Legally, it's incoherent. But even put all that aside,
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those are the ideological debates and the philosophies. Just practically, it's not going
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to happen. It's completely fantastical. So then what does he do? He's not doing anything. He's
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running his mouth, and he's trying to score cheap campaign points. But in practice, he is
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Okay. Now the libs are not, they're not just exploiting the tragedy to push the same old laws
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that are somewhat related to the tragedy, but largely unrelated, the same old gun laws.
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Now they're exploiting it to push their views of abortion. Julia Ioff, who is a blue check journo,
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a liberal journalist, though basically I repeat myself, when you say journalist,
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usually you're referring to a liberal. She just tweeted out, quote, what if you could perform
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an abortion with an AR-15? You would defend AR-15s? I guess. What point is she trying to make here?
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What if you could perform an abortion with an AR-15? Well, actually you can perform an abortion
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with an AR-15, strictly speaking. Probably not safest for the mother, but you could. What is an
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abortion? Abortion is killing a little baby. So you could, what point is she making here?
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I think she's undermining her own argument, but she's trying to insinuate that Republicans care
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very much about babies when they're in the womb, but they don't care about children when they're
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outside the womb. Because if they cared about children outside the womb, they would ban AR-15s,
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even though banning AR-15s would have almost certainly zero effect on any of these mass shooting
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incidents. Even though banning AR-15s, which we did, by the way, we did it in the 90s and it just
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didn't do anything to the murder rate. Even though these claims ban the AR-15s and all of the other
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proposals that the Democrats have made in recent years would not have stopped the mass shootings
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as even the Washington Post admits. So what point are you making? Well, Republicans are bad. It's all
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this vague insinuation without any facts whatsoever. It's all just this do something,
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do something. What do you want to do? Yelling do something and mocking people for offering their
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prayers does not make you virtuous. It's no more productive than the people who are trying to do
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something and perhaps failing. It's certainly no more productive than them. It's far less productive,
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I think. And it's far more crass because you're exploiting an incident that we should all agree is
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tragic. And there might be some things, some really basic safety precautions we could do to at least
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amp up the safety of the schools. And you're using that and you're ignoring the proposals to make the
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schools safer. And you're just moving on to get to your regular old hobby horse and get to your regular
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old pet project in politics. In this case, abortion, which is entirely unrelated. But they're so obsessed
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with abortion because they know how bad this makes them look. They're so obsessed with abortion because
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they know that abortion is the logical conclusion of their entire political agenda, which is about
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liberation and individual autonomy and selfishness, ultimately. Me, me, me. I will do whatever I want.
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Alistair Crowley said that, what was the line? To do your will is the entirety of the law. Do what
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thou wilt. And that is the entirety of the law. It's a hideous perversion, inversion of Christianity.
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And it just boils down to what we all know that the left is after, which is selfishness. I, me,
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my, I, me, my, I, me, my. And they know that that's the logical conclusion. They know that that's
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ugly. At a really basic level, be selfish is not a persuasive political platform. But they have to
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keep defending it, especially now that abortion is potentially about to be restricted. There was a
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gal on TikTok. I didn't believe this was legitimate at first. A gal on TikTok breastfeeding her child
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defending abortion. I could have killed you, but I chose to let you live. I chose to let her live.
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As in, I had a choice. All women should have a choice. Do you realize what you just said? Killed.
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I cannot wrap my brain around this. Don't matter how I look at it. If you don't want to use the word
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kill, that's fine. If you want to use the word kill, that's fine. When you use hand sanitizer,
00:17:47.260
you kill germs. I could have simply chosen to let you not exist, but I let you exist. I let you form
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past the zygote phase. Is that better? So yes, I realized what I just said and I stand by it. If you want
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to get an abortion, get an abortion. If you don't want to get an abortion, don't get an abortion,
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but don't try to oppress my rights. You got to hand it to her. This stone cold psycho
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is at least being honest about the whole thing. She's saying right now, I could have killed you
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and I chose not to kill you. And I know you pro-abortion people out there, you fellow pro-abortion
00:18:24.140
people, you don't want me to use the word kill. You want me to use some other euphemism. And she kind
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of makes fun of the euphemisms. I let you form past the zygote phase, which of course the zygote
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refers to the extremely brief period of time when a baby is a single cell and then it almost instantly
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is no longer a zygote. You can use whatever euphemism you want. You're still talking
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about the same living human being. She says, okay, I can use all these euphemisms, but it just means
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kill, right? And yeah, that's what we should be defending. That's what abortion is. And I want my
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right, my license to kill the baby. And I, in this case, I chose not to, but my choice, my
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exercise of the will absent all reason and justice is the most important political value. And that's
00:19:05.180
that. And if you don't like it tough, she is saying the quiet part out loud and it is extremely
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disturbing to watch her say it period, but certainly say it while breastfeeding and certainly say it to
00:19:17.220
her baby. But that's it. That's, that's what the logic of abortion is. And I thank her. I am indebted
00:19:25.140
to her for, for not hiding it and not, not trying to deceive everybody. No, that's it. If you find that
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appealing, then you support abortion. If you find that ghastly and unthinkable, then you're pro-life.
00:19:38.220
And maybe you haven't worked out all the abstract and all the really high sophisticated philosophy and
00:19:43.660
biology. But if you recoil at that video and you say, whoa, man, this is wrong. You are pro-life.
00:19:52.700
Just as this gal has followed her pro-abortion ideas to their logical conclusion, you just need
00:19:59.040
to follow your pro-life instincts to their logical conclusion. Not just her. There was a gal,
00:20:05.580
she's a BLM activist. Andy Ngo, my friend Andy Ngo just pointed this out yesterday. She's on Twitter
00:20:12.240
by the name Hidden Agenda. And she, I'm not going to read all of this. She sent out a long narrative
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of her getting an abortion. But here's what, here's what she said. She said,
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I didn't know when I was going to be ready to share my story, but I guess I was never going to be ready.
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Just effing angry. So here goes nothing. I got an abortion and it saved my effing life.
00:20:36.100
Then she says, she showed up and she was told that she was about 26, 27 weeks pregnant.
00:20:47.240
And it goes, update. Checked my MyChart to confirm. And I was 27 weeks and six days,
00:20:52.740
closer to 28 weeks pregnant. This is pretty much almost exactly as pregnant as sweet little Elisa
00:21:01.480
is right now with our baby. Who's kicking all the time. Who's moving all the time. Who's responding
00:21:05.440
to a ton of stimuli. Who is a fully formed baby. When you're 28 weeks pregnant, you are
00:21:12.240
very, very formed. You are identifiably human and living in every single way. And she says,
00:21:19.960
she went in and she said, I want an abortion. And there were only a few places where that is even
00:21:23.560
still legal even today in America. She got the shot to kill the baby, a shot through her stomach.
00:21:29.940
And then she says, Monday, January 17th, 2022 at approximately 6.30 PM. After a grueling night
00:21:36.700
filled with so much pain that I needed an epidural morphine and fentanyl, I gave birth to a just over
00:21:41.580
two pound, seven inch girl with no heartbeat. And she wanted this. She couldn't wait another 36 weeks
00:21:54.060
you can deliver. She couldn't wait another eight weeks to deliver this baby that she hated, her own
00:21:59.340
child. And just give the baby up for adoption to the many, many, many couples who are trying to
00:22:04.360
adopt. She wouldn't do that. She said, no, I'm not going to allow you to live. It wasn't even about
00:22:09.200
avoiding birth. I'm at least glad that this woman has debunked the lie that pro-lifers are in favor
00:22:17.000
of forced birth and that abortion somehow allows you to avoid birth. No, this woman didn't avoid birth.
00:22:22.360
She said she gave birth to a baby girl. The only difference is that the baby girl that she gave birth
00:22:27.460
to was dead because she had already killed her, but she's, she still gave birth. She just so hated
00:22:32.920
this baby and was so insistent on exercising her will, her selfish will, even to the point of killing
00:22:42.060
others, even to the point of killing her own child, that she was willing to give birth and go through
00:22:47.360
exactly all the same pain and all the same discomfort for a dead baby. This is the conclusion that Drew
00:22:57.800
Clavin talks about this, talk about logical conclusions. He says that one of the things
00:23:02.680
that brought him back to Christianity was actually the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis de Sade is where we
00:23:07.080
get the word sadism from. He's one of probably the most famous psycho in the history of the world.
00:23:11.340
And he was a pornographer and a killer and a psycho and also a philosopher, a philosopher of
00:23:17.980
torture and sadism and selfishness. And at the bottom of the Marquis de Sade's philosophy is
00:23:26.000
this one question, why, why is your pain any more important than my pleasure? Why should I care about
00:23:35.140
you at all, even to the point of torture, even to the point of death? If I want something,
00:23:41.680
why do I have to care about any of that, even to the point of killing my own kid?
00:23:46.420
Well, she's following that to its logical conclusion, getting rid of all the propaganda,
00:23:52.020
all the fake facts. It's not a baby. The baby's not alive. The baby's not a person. The baby doesn't
00:23:56.320
have to be born. No, she's saying, no, none of that's true. This is a human baby. I'm giving birth.
00:24:00.120
I just, I just want to kill it. If you recoil at that, just as this woman has followed abortion
00:24:06.100
to its logical conclusion, if you recoil in any way, you are pro-life. Just follow those views to
00:24:11.120
their logical conclusion. It's evil stuff. It's evil. It's the only way you can describe that.
00:24:20.580
There's no just totally clinical, neutral language we can use to describe the pistons firing in the brain
00:24:29.600
and the, no, it's just evil. Okay. Good and evil are real. They're much, they're much more real than
00:24:37.660
a lot of our scientific jargon that we use to deny these basic things that we all know to be true.
00:24:43.220
Good and evil, the things that people intuit, the moral realities that people intuit using their
00:24:48.360
common sense are much more real than the jargony abstractions that we all cook up in our postmodern
00:24:56.120
philosophy and sociology. And the left wants to deny good and evil because the left's program is
00:25:03.620
revolutionary. The left's program is undoing, upending everything that has been established.
00:25:11.240
You really see Marx take this to its logical conclusion in its fullest expression when Karl
00:25:16.460
Marx says that he wants to engage in the ruthless criticism of all that exists, which is where we get
00:25:23.520
things like critical theory from, critical race theory. We hear a lot of a critical legal theory,
00:25:27.540
that this withering, ruthless criticism of everything, all that exists, everything in
00:25:34.740
society, not just the laws, but the customs, not just the customs, but the institutions, not just the
00:25:39.640
institutions, but the family, the basic institution, not just the family, but human nature itself,
00:25:44.220
sex, boys and girls, the way we relate to one another, the way we relate to ourselves,
00:25:48.280
all of that has to be upended. And in order to do that, you have to deny the reality of good and
00:25:53.580
evil, true and false, right and wrong, which we all can interpret. This is why Gavin Newsom,
00:25:58.780
governor of California, I think unwittingly gave away the Democrats a game here in responding to the
00:26:07.200
shooting that took place in Texas. Governor Abbott, Greg Abbott of Texas, talked about the realities
00:26:14.400
of evil and the dangers of mental illness and the dangers of isolation and loneliness and the
00:26:20.280
problems of community fracture and losing some of these basic common sense measures that can protect
00:26:25.320
the community. And Gavin Newsom, all the way from California, decided to take potshots at him
00:26:29.840
for having the audacity, the gall to mention evil.
00:26:34.340
Do not give in to the cynicism and all the crap that you heard today in that press conference
00:26:41.860
around evil and mental health that completely belies the fact that there's only one nation on planet
00:26:49.860
earth that separates itself from all other nations. And that's the United States of America.
00:26:57.260
And the perversion of a second amendment that begins around well-regulated, well-regulated
00:27:12.300
So what he said factually there is not true, and you hear it repeated a lot by the left,
00:27:16.300
which is that the United States is the only, it's the outlier in the whole world. We have more mass
00:27:21.140
killings than anybody. It's not even close. And the only reason for that is because we have guns here.
00:27:26.820
The claim is just not true. It's not true when you adjust for population. We have a pretty large
00:27:32.240
population. When you adjust for population size, we're actually kind of toward the middle of the pack.
00:27:36.660
When you look at mass killing incidents, when you look at rates of violent crime and murder,
00:27:41.220
we're far closer to the middle of the pack in the forties, in the fifties than we are number one
00:27:46.900
far and away. That's not true. So the libs are manipulating statistics to make that claim. That's
00:27:51.180
what he's doing there. But forget about the statistics. You know, I don't really believe
00:27:54.060
in statistics. I'm happy to cite them when they back up my opinion as they do just now. But you have
00:27:59.440
your statistics, I have my statistics, and there are lies, damn lies in statistics. The craziest thing
00:28:04.720
that Newsom just said there is, ignore the cynicism you heard today about the realities of evil.
00:28:13.220
He's saying that to talk about evil is to be cynical, when in fact, that is the opposite of cynicism.
00:28:20.700
Cynicism is indifference toward the truth. Cynicism is the denial of truth. You see the perfect example
00:28:28.640
of cynicism when Christ is before Pontius Pilate and Christ says, I am the truth. And Pontius Pilate
00:28:36.620
says, what is truth? That is the perfect expression of cynicism. What is truth? That's what Gavin Newsom's
00:28:46.060
saying. He said, what is evil? What is good and bad? What is true and false? What is evil? Come on.
00:28:55.960
What is goodness? You're using those silly old terms. No, that's not real. We're just talking
00:29:01.980
about statistics. That is cynicism. He is the cynical guy, which is no surprise, of course,
00:29:07.940
because the Libs always project. The Libs are always accusing their opponents of the things that
00:29:12.620
they themselves are doing. How cynical? The only thing that might mitigate his culpability here is
00:29:22.440
that Gavin Newsom probably doesn't even understand the irony of what he's saying. But he is the one
00:29:26.840
pushing cynicism here. They're woe to those who call good evil and evil good. And you're seeing it
00:29:32.980
in the elementary schools. There was an elementary school in Wisconsin, which is now investigating a
00:29:39.920
school counselor for, quote unquote, immoral conduct. What was the immoral conduct? This counselor
00:29:47.320
opposes not just transgenderism, but opposes transing the kids. And this is considered
00:29:56.320
immoral by the school. Melissa Darling received a letter from the Wisconsin Department of Public
00:30:03.080
Instruction, April 29th, warning her that her state-issued license could be revoked if the
00:30:08.420
investigation finds she engaged in immoral conduct at a rally. They want to determine whether she said
00:30:14.800
F transgenderism on video and whether she said that she does not believe that children should
00:30:21.060
have access to cross-sex hormones or surgery. I don't think the immoral conduct is that she said
00:30:28.140
the F word. I suspect every teacher at that school and every staff member at that school has used the
00:30:32.560
F word at some point. It's that she said, you do not believe that children should be put on cross-sex
00:30:36.680
hormones and have their bodies mutilated. That's considered immoral. Of course, it is immoral to do that to
00:30:41.920
children. It is moral not to do that to children. There's no neutrality here. It's not just that
00:30:47.240
they've said, look, we're going to keep an open mind and be very liberal. No. They took the old
00:30:52.280
standard, which is mutilating kids' bodies and confusing them sexually is wrong. And they've said,
00:30:57.980
no, that's right. And not doing that is wrong. Disney Plus is doing this. We will get to the
00:31:02.580
mailbag. I'm always running late, as per usual. Disney Plus. Disney got dragged for promoting the weird
00:31:08.660
sex stuff with the little kids. Disney right now is doubling down on that and producing drag queen
00:31:16.220
content for little kids on Disney Plus. Hello, and welcome to the Disney Plus This Is Me Pride
00:31:24.600
Celebration Spectacular. I'm Nina West, and I'm here to guide you through a magical, musical, and
00:31:31.200
meaningful celebration of the LGBTQ plus community. Glisten's mission is to create safe and inclusive
00:31:38.620
schools for LGBTQ plus students in grades K through 12. And Disney Plus is so proud to support this
00:31:45.660
wonderful organization. For more information, visit www.glisten.org forward slash pride.
00:31:53.780
What are you going to do about it? They've already been dragged through the mud, Disney, and they don't
00:31:57.840
care. They're doubling down on trying to pervert the kids. They're doubling down on pushing perverted
00:32:04.060
sexual ideologies on little kids. And they're saying this is totally neutral. This is, look,
00:32:11.480
this is neutral. We're not pushing a moral view one way or the other. It's just, it's just open,
00:32:15.460
it's liberal, it's inclusive, it's diverse. How cynical do you have to be to say that sort of thing?
00:32:21.100
Woe to those who call good evil, evil good. If you, if you believe that there is no moral
00:32:27.240
component here, if you believe that you can just live in a totally neutral world where the realities of
00:32:32.440
right and wrong and good and bad and true and false don't matter, then you are as naive as can be.
00:32:38.540
You're so naive you could believe Gavin Newsom. You're so naive that you could believe Joe Biden
00:32:43.200
and the rest of these people who are pushing their radical moral agenda on you. And for so long,
00:32:50.300
the conservatives just roll over. They don't even know that it's happening. You know, for countless
00:32:53.880
actors and comedians in Hollywood who dare to push the wrong sequence of keys on their phone
00:32:58.140
or breathe the wrong way into a microphone. They pay with their careers, torn away from them
00:33:03.580
by a savage woke mob. Like my friend Gina Carano. Gina Carano tweeted unthinkable thoughts such as
00:33:11.060
neighbors should be nice to each other and elections should be fair. She was immediately thrown out of
00:33:17.140
the cast of The Mandalorian. She was banished from the magical kingdom. The whole thing was an
00:33:23.800
atrocity. And at The Daily Wire, we will not stand for it. That's why we fought back by hiring Gina
00:33:28.780
and starring her in our new summer blockbuster, Terror on the Prairie, which premieres exclusively
00:33:34.380
on The Daily Wire on June 14th. Set on the plains of Montana, this gritty thriller follows a family
00:33:39.300
of pioneers as they defend themselves from a vicious gang of outlaws hellbent on revenge.
00:33:44.800
We are giving you a sneak peek next week when the trailer will drop on June 1st. To top it all off,
00:33:49.020
the official Terror on the Prairie movie poster is in our shop right now. Go to dailywire.com
00:33:53.480
slash shop. Become a member today, dailywire.com slash shop. We also have my favorite time of the
00:33:59.320
week coming up, the mailbag sponsored by Pure Talk. I love Pure Talk because they have a great service
00:34:05.220
and they have great phones and they're terrific. But even more than that, somehow even more than that,
00:34:10.360
I love Pure Talk because they're sponsoring our new voicemail bag so that you can send your voicemails
00:34:15.040
into the show and I get to hear your dulcet tones. Go to puretalk.com, enter promo code
00:34:18.780
NOLSPODCAST to save 50% off your first month. Let's get to the first voicemail bag.
00:34:23.720
Hi, Michael. Huge fan of the show. I just wanted to get your take on something.
00:34:28.900
I recently found this book titled Good Grief Rituals. And while I was optimistic when I first
00:34:35.160
came across it, it didn't take me long to realize that a lot of these, quote, rituals were
00:34:41.780
hippy-dippy, tree-hugging, something you'd find at the bottom of Anthony Kennedy's bong.
00:34:49.140
So, with that being said, I wanted to ask you, how do you use religion, Christianity to help you
00:34:58.640
deal with grief and loss? Because that's something I have always struggled with.
00:35:04.540
You don't use it, first of all. There's a quote of C.S. Lewis that I go back to again and again
00:35:10.160
because it's so good. He says, if you look for truth, you might find comfort in the end. If you
00:35:14.780
look for comfort, you will find neither truth nor comfort, only soft soap and wishful thinking to
00:35:19.800
begin and in the end despair. It's one thing to lecture on how to deal with grief on a sunny day.
00:35:28.200
This is what C.S. Lewis actually did in his book, The Problem of Pain. It's another thing to deal with
00:35:33.960
grief in real life, which is something that C.S. Lewis acknowledged in his book, A Grief Observed,
00:35:38.880
talking about the death of his wife. When I was in high school, I had to deal with a grief.
00:35:45.620
And I was an atheist, and I remained atheistic and agnostic for some time after that. But I did
00:35:52.940
find myself in the same position you were in. I was looking, how do I process this grief? How do I
00:35:57.320
deal with it? What do I do? You just want to talk to the person again. You have all of these natural
00:36:01.080
longings. And when you start searching in our secular, confused age, you end up with all of these
00:36:08.360
hippy-dippy, really bizarre, sometimes occult, sometimes scientistic, sometimes really out
00:36:14.200
there kind of rituals. And none of it is satisfying and none of it is coherent.
00:36:21.820
Religion, Christianity, will help you to deal with grief. It won't erase grief. Grief is just a part of
00:36:29.020
the human condition. Jesus wept. It's the shortest verse of the Bible. He wept at the death of his
00:36:33.620
friend Lazarus. Two seconds before he raises Lazarus from the dead. That tells you something
00:36:38.260
about the reality of grief, the inevitability of grief in this world. But it will help you to make
00:36:44.060
sense of it because true religion makes sense. That's what makes it true religion. And that's
00:36:49.980
what makes sense for that matter. So in a very straightforward way,
00:36:57.080
how do I process grief now? My Savior lives. I have confidence that good triumphs over evil. I have
00:37:08.340
confidence in the immortality of the human soul. I have confidence in salvation for those who
00:37:15.020
seek it. Or not even those who seek it, those who cooperate with God's grace. I have confidence in
00:37:22.440
that. I think that those are facts. That's why hope is not merely wishful thinking. That's why hope is
00:37:27.580
not just soft optimism. Hope is a theological virtue and a fact grounded not just on poetry
00:37:34.420
and aphorisms, but grounded on the journalism of the gospel. So that grounds my hope. But it does not
00:37:42.440
mean that you will avoid grief. It's not a get out of jail free card. You will have to deal with that.
00:37:48.260
It reminds me of that distinction that a priest friend of mine, Father George Rutler,
00:37:51.620
made between optimism and pessimism. He said that the difference between a Scottish optimist and a
00:37:57.540
Scottish pessimist is that a Scottish pessimist says things can't get any worse and a Scottish
00:38:02.220
optimist says, oh yes, they can. In a way, what religion does, what Christianity does, is it gives
00:38:08.940
you hope because it tells you how bad things really are. And it doesn't sugarcoat that, okay? It tells you
00:38:15.040
the reality of how bad things are. Things are so bad that God had to send his only begotten son to the
00:38:20.680
world to be tortured and killed to save the world. And that's how we treated him.
00:38:26.580
So that ain't sugarcoating anything, but there is a happy ending, which is why on Easter,
00:38:32.260
when we're talking about eternal life and the resurrection, this is why on Easter,
00:38:36.860
Christians chant, oh happy fault, the fault, the fall of man in the garden of Eden,
00:38:41.100
oh happy fault that one for us so great, so glorious redeemer. Even in your grief,
00:38:45.080
that can point one's eyes up toward hope. Next, voicemail bag.
00:38:50.980
Hey Michael, this is Thomas, long-time listener, first-time mailbag submitter. I have an idea
00:38:56.640
about the abortion conversation, which I want to run by you. I think it was confirmed by your talk
00:39:00.400
with the woman a couple weeks ago. It seems to me that it's an unproductive conversation to have
00:39:05.260
with anyone who has a strong belief on the issue. Now, I say that because you're either talking to
00:39:09.560
another pro-lifer and you're preaching to the choir, or you're talking to a diehard abortionist
00:39:14.140
who I would say has a fundamentally incompatible view of reality. We believe that abortion kills a
00:39:20.640
living human being and that that is evil. They believe that there is no life to kill. Point is,
00:39:26.140
if we're having a conversation with them, we're talking in completely different directions.
00:39:31.180
Now, I guess the silver lining is that those who aren't as firm in their position can have their
00:39:35.640
minds changed. But when it comes to those diehard abortionists, what is the value in having a
00:39:40.920
conversation with them? I have to correct you here. The diehard abortionists do not question
00:39:46.860
that the life is a life, I have found, in my experience. The squishy pro-abortion people will
00:39:53.160
try to tell you, well, the life isn't really a life. Well, the baby's not really a baby. But the
00:39:57.260
hardcore ones are the ones that I read today, that I showed you today on TikTok, and the ones that I've
00:40:02.860
been talking to and debating for the past few weeks, they acknowledge, or Naomi Wolf even,
00:40:08.460
she may have changed her view on abortion. But in the 90s, she said, if we want to defend abortion,
00:40:12.740
we have to acknowledge the baby's a baby, the baby's alive, and mommy needs to kill the baby
00:40:17.140
and all of the baby's humanity if she wants to be equal to men. I'm paraphrasing her argument.
00:40:23.140
Those are the hardcore people. And so the value, I think, in having that conversation
00:40:27.400
is to have it publicly. Because hope springs eternal in the human breast, maybe you will
00:40:34.800
convince them. But even if not, when you have that debate publicly, you are showing people
00:40:41.180
the logical conclusions of the two sides, the premises and the logical conclusions of the two
00:40:46.820
sides. You can get rid of some of the nonsense and some of the false information about the abortion
00:40:52.860
debate. And then you just come down to, okay, I think that we should not merely live for our own
00:40:58.020
whims and wills, and we should recognize the eternal moral order, and we should not kill our babies.
00:41:05.160
Versus, I think we should be, the pro-abortion side would say, I think we should be able to commit
00:41:09.960
any evil that we want if that is our will. And if we will not even to call it evil, then we can do
00:41:19.340
that too. Those are the conclusions. And so I think that can be very helpful because it shows people
00:41:24.400
who are watching the debate, huh, I don't know, I haven't totally thought about this thing, but
00:41:28.840
that guy sounds kind of reasonable. And I basically seem to agree with his, and that lady sounds like
00:41:35.660
a stone cold freaking killer psycho. And so even though in my mind, I agree with her position,
00:41:42.400
she seems like a total psycho. And the reality of the situation is making me think maybe that guy's
00:41:47.260
right. And I think that can be persuasive to people on the other side. When you're talking
00:41:52.380
to the squishy people in the middle, and they're the ones who say, well, who knows? Who knows when
00:41:57.280
life begins, the mystery of human life? I think it's actually much easier to convince them. You say,
00:42:02.220
well, look, it's a human being. We now know that the egg and the sperm come together, and they
00:42:07.920
cease to be the egg and the sperm, and they create a new, different, in-kind, unique human entity
00:42:15.920
that is alive, that satisfies all of these scientifically agreed upon characteristics
00:42:20.540
of life. So no matter what you think about whether or not it's okay to kill these people,
00:42:26.480
you have to acknowledge two things. It's human, and it's alive. I've had two big abortion debates
00:42:33.020
on my YouTube channel in the last few weeks. And both of these gals who agreed to came on
00:42:37.580
admitted that. And they're defenders of abortion. But at least they admitted, yeah, okay, you're right,
00:42:47.420
there's no getting out of this. Scientifically, ontologically, it's living, and it's human.
00:42:53.560
So I think it can be productive, but it's not always productive in the way people think.
00:42:57.020
Sometimes it's productive for the people listening to the debate itself. All right,
00:43:01.080
next voicemail back. Hey, Michael, my name is Cooper. I'm a huge fan of the show. I love what
00:43:06.580
you guys do at The Daily Wire. I wanted to ask you, how do we as conservatives deal with the crazy
00:43:12.800
people on their side? My whole family is conservative, and during 2020, they went off the
00:43:19.180
deep end. With everything that happened, you know, this coronavirus, the election, all of that,
00:43:25.640
it made them start to buy into a lot of other conspiracy theories that aren't true. For example,
00:43:33.140
my mother's a flat earther now. None of my family members believe that we landed on the moon,
00:43:38.840
other than me. They thought that Trump was still in control, and like, he was running things from the
00:43:45.080
shadows or whatever. But I've shown them evidence to disprove their theories, and they just don't
00:43:52.060
listen to it. So how can I bring them back from insanity? They don't even listen to The Daily Wire
00:43:57.920
anymore because they think that you guys aren't far right enough. I hope to get a response, and I
00:44:04.660
hope you have a wonderful day, man. Thanks for what you do. Even me, I'm not far right enough. I'm to
00:44:09.920
the right of Genghis Khan. But okay, so first of all, the place to begin is politics is a team sport.
00:44:16.640
But politics involves loyalty, and you don't need to feel embarrassed. On every team, there's going
00:44:24.840
to be some people who are a little out there and a little weird, and we all have our foibles.
00:44:28.540
You don't need to feel embarrassed of the people on your side to try to score points with the people
00:44:31.980
on the other side. There is no conspiracy theory held by anyone on the right that is crazier than
00:44:36.840
the conspiracy theories held by the mainstream left, namely babies aren't babies, and boys are actually
00:44:42.720
secretly girls. Okay, those are the craziest conspiracy theories I've ever heard. They're
00:44:46.800
crazier than the flat earth. They're crazier than we didn't go to the moon. They're crazier than anything
00:44:51.240
I've ever heard from the right. Now, some people on the right will fall into things that are just not
00:44:55.540
true. I wish that Trump were still running the country. He's obviously not. So I would, if you begin,
00:45:01.400
I think, you can begin from two places. It's more of an attitudinal question than it is even a
00:45:06.720
substance question. If you begin from, oh, mom, come on, don't say that. You're going to make us
00:45:13.060
all look stupid to the libs, and then they're going to think we're crazy, and I'm one of the
00:45:17.240
smart conservatives, and don't say that, then she's going to recoil from you. And she's going
00:45:21.400
to say, well, you're probably in on the evil Illuminati Freemason cabal too. And so, you know,
00:45:26.060
you're, get out of here, you. But if you come at it from, hey, mom, look, yeah, the libs are completely
00:45:31.200
out of their minds, and they've lied to us about everything. And the difference between a conspiracy
00:45:34.380
theory and the truth these days is about six to nine months. So that's true. But, you know,
00:45:38.260
the earth is not flat, actually. And here's the evidence for it. And look, but I wish Trump was
00:45:41.740
still in charge, but he's not in charge. And we can, I don't know, try to make him in charge again.
00:45:45.880
But if you come at it from that perspective, if you think about politics more as a distinction
00:45:50.420
between your friends and your allies and your enemies and your opponents, and you realize that
00:45:55.140
that is just in a practical way, that's how you're going to begin the art of politics,
00:46:00.720
and that politics is not merely loyalties and alliances, but also has to do with logic and
00:46:05.540
has to do with reason and has to do with objective truth, but you don't deny the team sport aspect of
00:46:10.600
it, then I think you're going to be more persuasive. So there are some conservatives who their first
00:46:15.200
instinct is to throw their own guys under the bus. And I just don't think that, I think politically
00:46:20.240
that's stupid. And I don't think it's a particularly virtuous way to conduct politics. One more
00:46:24.580
question. Let's do a real mailbag one, a written one. Shannon, hey, Michael, you've said recently
00:46:29.100
that the ends don't justify the means and you wouldn't commit a sin to solve a larger problem.
00:46:33.300
I have a question. Would you lie to a Nazi about Jews hiding in your attic? If you are so strict
00:46:38.240
in your deontology, could it not be argued that an otherwise sinful act might be motivated by good
00:46:43.040
will and duty, such as the Nazi example? In your view, how can there be any just wars? Thanks and
00:46:47.660
love the show. Oh, well, those are two separate questions. In terms of the Nazis show up and I'm
00:46:52.020
hiding Jews in my attic. What do I say to them? Is a lie justified? I am with Saints Augustine and
00:46:59.620
Thomas Aquinas. This issue has been debated for the entire history of the West, but I'm with Augustine
00:47:04.220
and Thomas Aquinas. I do not think that lies are justified. I think that lies are intrinsically wrong.
00:47:10.580
Now, I might be able to use my language in such a way that I could convey something that is true in
00:47:19.400
itself, but that the Nazis would not believe to be true. So you could say, if I were near a hill and
00:47:29.640
they said, do you have any Jews in your house? I could say, I saw him running up. I saw him running.
00:47:34.940
And you point. And you could even point at the hill. Now, you saw the Jew that you're hiding,
00:47:40.860
running up your stairs. But the Nazis could interpret that as he's running up the hill.
00:47:47.060
They might take off. That's possible. Now, even that might be a little bit morally suspect.
00:47:51.380
Some people have made arguments that lies can be justified. And there are serious philosophers who
00:47:56.800
have made arguments that a certain kind of lie could possibly be justified because people do not have
00:48:01.780
the right to know that a lie does not involve merely conveying false information that you know
00:48:07.340
to be false, but it is conveying false information that you know to be false to people who have the
00:48:11.640
right to know that information. So if the people don't have the right to know that information,
00:48:14.740
then it's not really a lie. I think that reasoning is a little weak to me. Now, to your second
00:48:20.420
question, how can there be just wars? Because people do have a natural right to self-defense and
00:48:26.500
there is a legitimate claim that our calls to be peaceable and make peace among nations
00:48:32.820
is not a blanket license to allow the cruel to rape the earth. And so also going back to my good
00:48:38.860
buddy, St. Thomas Aquinas, this has been fleshed out over the centuries and there is no Christian call
00:48:43.920
to pacifism. That has never really been understood in the mainstream history of Christianity. There is,
00:48:51.240
though, to go back also to my other dead friend, C.S. Lewis, he has an excellent essay on why he's not
00:48:55.440
a pacifist. We're two minutes over, so I can't really get into it now, but that would be a good
00:48:59.560
essay for Memorial Day weekend reading and maybe we'll get into it more next week. I'm Michael
00:49:03.100
Knowles. Have a good Memorial Day. We'll see you next time.
00:49:11.800
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00:49:55.880
Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show. You know, some people are
00:50:00.140
depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned
00:50:04.720
to blood. But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started. So come on over to
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The Andrew Klavan Show and laugh your way through the fall of the republic with me, Andrew Klavan.