The Michael Knowles Show

00:00:00.000 A few years ago, Germany decided to phase out coal as a source of its energy.

00:00:05.960 This decision was driven by the German environmental movement, which was funded and encouraged by

00:00:11.540 Russia, which does not care at all about the environment, certainly not Germany's environment,

00:00:16.080 but does want Europe to be more dependent on Russian oil and gas. The German government had

00:00:22.440 already gone cold on nuclear energy years earlier, again, thanks to that environmentalist movement,

00:00:28.380 and renewable energy is mostly a joke. So by killing coal, Germany gave virtually all of its

00:00:35.880 leverage on energy away to Putin. Once Putin had all of the leverage, Putin invaded Ukraine.

00:00:42.920 But once Putin invaded Ukraine, Germany was pressured to stop buying Russian gas. Now,

00:00:49.560 Germany still needed the Russian gas. So Germany is today trying to restart the coal plants before

00:00:56.980 the Germans freeze to death in the winter and before European resolve completely collapses

00:01:01.780 on the sanctions against Russia, which means that Europe today is weaker economically and from a

00:01:10.020 security standpoint, without any environmental benefit whatsoever. And the craziest part of it

00:01:16.480 all is that Trump predicted all of it. You know, everybody's, everybody's talking about it all over

00:01:23.360 the world. They'll say, well, wait a minute, we're supposed to be protecting you from Russia,

00:01:26.660 but why are you paying billions of dollars to Russia for energy? Why are countries in NATO,

00:01:33.880 namely Germany, having a large percentage of the energy needs paid, you know, to Russia and taken care of

00:01:41.740 by Russia? Now, if you look at it, Germany is a captive of Russia because they supply, they got rid of their coal

00:01:48.320 lands, they got rid of their nuclear. They're getting so much of the oil and gas from Russia.

00:01:54.400 I think it's something that NATO has to look at. I think it's very inappropriate. You and I agree

00:01:58.940 that it's inappropriate. That was Trump reaming out the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg back in

00:02:06.420 2018. The pain that the West is experiencing right now is not a fluke. It's not just dumb luck.

00:02:14.600 Aw, shucks. Who could have guessed this? This was all clear to everyone with even a modicum of

00:02:21.900 common sense. The West's enemies are eating our lunch and we can whine about it and we can cry about

00:02:28.700 it, but we have mostly ourselves, or at the very least, our incompetent and corrupt ruling class

00:02:34.420 to blame. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.

00:02:44.600 Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday from Timothy Brinson, who says,

00:02:50.660 Joe Biden, running America is as easy as riding a bike. That's not nice. That's not nice. It's

00:02:58.100 pretty accurate. It's as easy as riding a bike. You never forget. You never forget how to do it

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00:04:22.620 slash Michael. Start investing in cryptocurrency today. Altoira.com slash Michael. There is one

00:04:30.220 headline that has been cropping up, I don't know, every three weeks, four weeks over the past

00:04:36.060 several months. And the headline is this, Vladimir Putin dying from cancer, or Vladimir Putin dying

00:04:44.000 from Parkinson's, or Vladimir Putin dangerously, gravely ill, irrational, not making his normal

00:04:51.960 moves. And I hate it. I don't hate that Vladimir Putin is dying. I don't hate, I just, I hate the

00:04:58.220 headline because the headline to me is just the West making excuses for why we didn't predict what

00:05:09.680 Putin is going to do. Or actually, a lot of conservatives did predict what Putin was going

00:05:14.480 to do. A lot of conservatives said, if you give Vladimir Putin this oil pipeline that allows it to

00:05:21.600 bypass Ukraine, it's going to invade Ukraine. That's what the president of Ukraine says,

00:05:24.460 for goodness sakes. And the ruling class, the liberal ruling class in America and in Europe,

00:05:29.840 they said, gosh, who could have predicted this? I know why. It's because Putin's acting completely

00:05:34.760 irrationally. It's because he's got cancer and he's looking death right in the face. No,

00:05:40.000 he's not acting irrationally. He's acting very rationally. Does Vladimir Putin have cancer?

00:05:45.060 Maybe. I don't know. Is Vladimir Putin on the brink of death? I don't really think so,

00:05:49.880 but maybe he is. Regardless, the man is acting in a very rational way. We're the ones acting

00:05:57.140 irrationally. We in the West, America too, but Germany also, the West broadly. It was irrational

00:06:05.140 for Germany to give up its energy programs. It was irrational for Europe and Germany to give

00:06:13.360 Vladimir Putin this oil pipeline. It has been irrational to allow environmentalist groups

00:06:18.900 funded by Russia to convince us to get rid of our nuclear programs. It is irrational for Joe Biden

00:06:25.600 right now to shut down American oil and gas, new American oil and gas leases, new American oil and

00:06:31.260 gas pipelines, just so that we can buy more oil from Putin. And when not from Putin, from the Iranians

00:06:38.300 or from the Venezuelans or from the Saudi Arabians, for that matter, the Saudis who we have a generally

00:06:43.100 pretty good relationship with relative to those other guys. And even then, why are we buying the oil

00:06:47.360 from them? The oil from them doesn't pollute the environment, but the oil in America does.

00:06:52.620 That's irrational. Putin trying to take back the old territory of the Soviet Union,

00:06:58.140 it's not good, but it's perfectly rational. I get why he's doing it. And if the West had taken Putin

00:07:07.000 seriously and had taken geopolitics more seriously than we have in recent years, we probably wouldn't

00:07:13.280 be in this position. And now when the West gets caught with his pants down, what do they say?

00:07:17.840 They say, oh no, it's because he's just acting like a madman. He's not acting like a madman. We're

00:07:23.480 acting like madmen. Maybe we should get our heads screwed on straight and stop putting our heads in

00:07:28.480 the sand. And I don't know how many more metaphors I can mix, but start taking this stuff a little bit

00:07:33.920 more seriously. We'd be in much better shape. Got to stop evading reality. Do you know part of the

00:07:42.500 reason why we can't game out Putin or we can't game out Xi Jinping or we can't act like responsible,

00:07:50.740 serious people on the world stage? Because we can't even figure out what a woman is and we can't

00:07:55.140 figure out what a man is. And we're wasting all of our time debating these stupid things that even a

00:08:00.520 five-year-old knows, that we no longer know. The genius adults running our country no longer know.

00:08:06.860 This is one of the reasons that we need settled norms. There are many good things about having

00:08:12.780 settled norms. One of them is that we don't waste our time. A society that doesn't know what a man is

00:08:21.980 and what a woman is cannot advance to more complicated questions. It's sort of like in school,

00:08:27.680 you've got to learn two plus two equals four before you can start looking at trigonometry

00:08:34.140 or more advanced algebra or calculus. You can't do those things until you figure out the basics. If

00:08:40.560 you're constantly stuck at the basics of statecraft, of the relationship of the individual to the state

00:08:46.420 and to each other, you're not going to be able to advance to more complex questions. And then what's

00:08:51.480 going to happen? Your enemies are going to eat your lunch. These questions of norms are largely

00:08:58.000 why the movie Lightyear just flopped at the box office over the weekend, which not to say I told

00:09:05.380 you so, but I did predict that that would happen. The Lightyear movie is the latest Toy Story movie.

00:09:11.820 It's a prequel. And unlike the earlier Toy Story movies, which generally are good, certainly the first

00:09:17.320 one is terrific. I think number two is good too. I don't think I saw number three or was there a

00:09:23.120 fourth? There might've been a fourth. But generally they've been good movies. And then this one,

00:09:28.200 they fire Tim Allen, who's the voice of Buzz Lightyear, and they fire him because he's a

00:09:32.200 conservative. It's the only reason that makes sense. They didn't fire him because he was too

00:09:35.680 expensive. They hired a more expensive actor to do it, Chris Evans. But Chris Evans is a huge lib

00:09:39.960 and Tim Allen is an outspoken conservative. So they fire Tim Allen and then they insist on

00:09:45.420 inserting a lesbian kiss scene. They insist. And it had initially been cut, but then the gay

00:09:53.080 organization of Disney employees got very upset that it was cut. And so for Pride Month and to

00:09:59.400 spite Governor Ron DeSantis, they reinserted a lesbian kiss scene. And then a bunch of conservative

00:10:05.320 parents and normal parents and centrist parents and center left parents even said, no, no, I don't

00:10:11.100 think so. Because it's not even just because we don't want to see lesbian toys kiss. It's because

00:10:17.160 it's not Toy Story. It's because whatever this thing is, I know it looks like Toy Story. It's got

00:10:24.040 the same characters and the same colors and the same animation, but it's not Toy Story. Now it's the left

00:10:30.860 using Toy Story, which is a nice wholesome normal story to push its own woke ideology. The box office

00:10:38.260 estimates dropped 35% in one day. Early Friday morning, heading into the weekend, the estimated

00:10:47.280 box office was $85 million domestic. Then by the end of the day, the estimates had dropped down to 55

00:10:54.440 million. The actual close was 51 million. The estimates for the global box office was 135 million,

00:11:00.820 then dropped down to $85.6 million. Way, way down. Wasn't even the biggest movie of the weekend.

00:11:10.160 So much money went into this movie. So much hype went into this movie. Didn't even clear the biggest

00:11:14.280 movie of the weekend. The biggest movie of the weekend was the new Jurassic Park movie, which did

00:11:19.060 not open this past weekend. It opened the weekend previously. So the second weekend for Jurassic Park was

00:11:23.820 better than the first weekend for the new Toy Story movie. Why? It's obviously just because of this

00:11:30.060 fight over norms and over the gay kiss and the liberal actor playing Buzz Lightyear. And it's

00:11:36.480 because the left has misunderstood America's penchant for tolerance. Now, when you want to just take the

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00:13:05.840 on over to helixsleep.com slash Knowles. Americans are very tolerant, but we do not want to normalize

00:13:14.860 much of the stuff that we tolerate. There's a difference between toleration and normalization.

00:13:24.220 And the libs are banking on American tolerance in their campaign to normalize all sorts of behaviors,

00:13:32.960 but we don't want to normalize that stuff. Americans like our norms. Americans are happy to tolerate

00:13:40.880 people, especially on the sex issues, people's eccentric sexual desires and behaviors.

00:13:46.700 Everybody's got a gay cousin or something and no one really cares, right? We all just sort of

00:13:51.040 tolerate it. It's fine. Okay. It's not a big deal, but we don't want the LGBT ideology being taught to

00:13:59.900 our kids in public schools, in libraries, in the movies. We don't want that. We're happy to tolerate.

00:14:06.140 We'll tolerate the drag queen at the bar in Greenwich Village. We'll tolerate that that exists. We don't

00:14:13.820 really care. We will not allow that behavior to be normalized. We'll tolerate transgenderism in the

00:14:20.140 sense that if there's a mentally ill man who thinks that he's a woman, we're not going to go out of our

00:14:26.020 way to get in his face and say, no, you're actually a man. We're not going to do it. You remember Ben

00:14:33.220 Shapiro went viral some years ago because he was on TV and this transgender dude was just getting all

00:14:40.400 up in his face and yelling at him. And Ben said, well, what are your genetic characteristics, sir?

00:14:46.540 Right? He was being provocative because it was a TV show, but he actually wasn't the one provoking

00:14:51.080 the situation. That wasn't an example of Ben being intolerant. I'm sure that if Ben has said this

00:14:57.660 himself, if he were at a dinner party and some dude in a dress asked to be called she, he would oblige

00:15:02.160 in the moment in the dinner party. But what is being asked by the TV debates over transgenderism

00:15:09.340 and the transgender ideology in classrooms and libraries and movies is not toleration. It's

00:15:14.320 normalization. It's not just, hey, will you in your charity, in your grace, in your politeness,

00:15:21.120 indulge some delusions of people at a dinner party? Will you tolerate this strange behavior?

00:15:28.960 It is the demand that we actually lie and we actually pretend that it is normal for a man to

00:15:36.020 think that he's a woman and that the man actually is a woman. We're not going to do that. Okay. And

00:15:39.820 I'm not just speaking for the right wing conservatives here. America is just not going

00:15:43.480 to do that. And that's why the Buzz Lightyear movie is not making a lot of money. And it's why

00:15:48.080 there's a parents movement in Virginia, in Florida, all around the country. And the Democrats are shocked

00:15:52.900 by this. They're shocked because they overplayed their hand. And yet the libs keep pushing this.

00:15:58.500 Joe Biden, in a pride month remarks, just came out and he said, the ultra MAGA people now,

00:16:06.820 we're the weird ones because we're going after Mickey Mouse because we don't want LGBT propaganda

00:16:13.880 in the Disney movies. No one knows better than the people in this room. We have a lot more work to

00:16:19.300 do. A lot more work to do. I don't have to tell you about the ultra MAGA agenda attacking families

00:16:25.600 and our freedoms. 300 discriminatory bills introduced in states across this country. In Texas, knocking on

00:16:32.440 front doors to harass and investigate parents who are raising transgender children. In Florida,

00:16:37.620 going after Mickey Mouse, for God's sake. That's trying to close the home. No, but think about this.

00:16:48.800 All of you in this room know better than anyone that these attacks are real and consequential

00:16:53.080 for real families. Ha ha ha ha. They're going after Mickey Mouse for, yeah, because Mickey Mouse

00:16:58.880 isn't Mickey Mouse anymore. Just like Buzz Lightyear isn't Buzz Lightyear anymore.

00:17:03.340 This is what you're, what you might, you might look like Mickey Mouse. He might have the sound of

00:17:11.080 Mickey Mouse, but the things that Mickey is pushing are radical leftist propaganda. Ha ha ha. Men can

00:17:19.400 really be women. Ha ha ha. Little kids should chop off their body parts. Ha ha ha. And take puberty

00:17:24.480 blockers. Ha ha ha. Isn't that funny, goofy? Ha ha ha. No, man, that's, what are, you're like a weird

00:17:29.460 demon Mickey. You're not the real Mickey. You're some bizarro world Mickey that has been hollowed out

00:17:34.760 and had the essence of Mickey taken out of it. And so what the left banks on is people's now

00:17:41.060 generational affection for the Disney characters, which have now been murdered and have been hollowed

00:17:48.440 out. And the leftist virus has crawled inside and reanimated its, its corpse. And it is just used

00:17:55.960 to push radicalism. That's, that's what Disney is, is under fire for. That's what Florida is pushing

00:18:02.320 back against. Florida says, don't teach five-year-olds weird sex stuff. Disney says,

00:18:09.200 we're going to put all the weight of our gigantic multinational corporation behind a campaign to

00:18:15.480 undermine the voters of Florida. And then Florida says, no, you're not. No, we're going to actually

00:18:20.240 take away some of your tax incentives. We're going to fight back. We're not going to let you do that.

00:18:23.900 And so the White House takes the side of the big, woke, crazy multinational corporation trying to

00:18:29.280 groom the kids. And it's not working. DeSantis is very popular in Florida. The politicians around

00:18:35.120 the country who are taking the side of parents and opposing the woke corporations are winning.

00:18:40.880 And this is great news for DeSantis, by the way. This is real. I mean, Ron DeSantis is one of the most

00:18:45.340 talented young politicians I've ever seen. This guy somehow is at the center of every national news story.

00:18:53.120 And Joe Biden clearly sees him as a threat. That's why, that's why the sitting president

00:18:57.440 of the United States, the incumbent who at least says that he's going to run for reelection,

00:19:01.560 keeps going after DeSantis. DeSantis is playing this very well. Not only is he doing the right

00:19:08.920 thing here, but politically he's doing the smart thing. DeSantis has also just made a very smart

00:19:15.900 political calculation that not a lot of people are picking up on. DeSantis just came out during a press

00:19:22.260 conference about an infrastructure plan and decided to talk about the recent elections

00:19:28.120 in Columbia. And I just want to say for, on behalf of the people of Florida, we watched

00:19:34.640 the election results down in Columbia. And we have a lot of great Colombian Americans here in our state

00:19:41.160 who were very concerned about what was going on. And I think the results of that election have been

00:19:46.520 very, very troubling for people that believe in freedom in the Western Hemisphere. To elect a former

00:19:52.860 narco-terrorist and a Marxist to lead Columbia is going to be disastrous. And so we've stood with the

00:20:00.060 people here in Florida that have ties to Columbia. We've had a great relationship with Columbia as a

00:20:06.280 state. We were all hoping that the outcome would be different. But we've got a problem in the Western

00:20:11.760 Hemisphere with Marxism and totalitarianism really spreading. I mean, we thought, you know, 25 years

00:20:19.220 ago, the Cold War and all this stuff, and it just keeps rearing its head. So we'll continue to stand

00:20:25.160 with the people of Florida here who are passionate about freedom in the Western Hemisphere, particularly

00:20:30.300 in Columbia. But, but very, very disappointing and very, very troubling result in that election.

00:20:36.880 Why is the governor of Florida talking about the Colombian election? Florida, last time I checked,

00:20:46.680 doesn't have a foreign policy. Now, it's got a lot of foreigners and then people who become,

00:20:51.300 become Americans. But it does. The foreign policy is conducted by the federal government,

00:20:56.280 not by the state government. Why is Ron DeSantis talking about this election in Columbia? It's because

00:21:03.260 after the Cubans, Colombians are becoming one of the most important demographic groups for movement

00:21:11.840 from left to right, Democrat to Republican. The Republicans have, have long counted on the support

00:21:20.860 of Cubans. This, this is the, historically, this has been the one Hispanic group that supports the

00:21:27.340 Republicans in large numbers. That's why it's the one Hispanic group that the Democrats hate.

00:21:32.020 That's why, that's why Barack Obama, while he was flooding the country with Hispanic illegal aliens,

00:21:37.700 decided to make it harder for Cubans to come into America because he doesn't like those Cubans

00:21:42.380 because the Cubans vote for Republicans. Well, Colombians after the Cubans are an important group of

00:21:47.720 Hispanics that have moved huge. I mean, Hispanics broadly have moved to the right in over the last

00:21:52.660 three years, but Colombians in particular have done that. And Colombians are an important constituency

00:21:56.880 in Florida and Colombians still are paying attention to what's going on in their old country.

00:22:01.720 And DeSantis is signaling to them, I stand with you guys. I stand against the radical leftist

00:22:07.720 Colombians who are still back there in that country who just elected a Marxist. The reason this matters

00:22:13.100 is it shows you that while DeSantis gets the issues right, and he's able to play the media very well,

00:22:19.240 he is focused on the minutiae, on the nitty gritty of going into these individual groups and winning

00:22:26.280 them over. Just as DeSantis has, I think, done a very, very good job of winning over important

00:22:32.720 constituencies in the conservative movement, groups in the media, groups in the think tanks,

00:22:37.660 Ron DeSantis has systematically gone in and won those groups over. So too, he's doing that down to the

00:22:43.680 ethnic groups, down to the geographic groups. It shows you that this is a calculated politician.

00:22:51.360 And that's if the other candidates who are looking at 2024, including Donald Trump for that matter,

00:22:57.560 if they want to stop the DeSantis momentum, they've got to get that granular too. Because this guy,

00:23:03.400 every day, this guy wakes up and he says, what can I do today that will put me closer to the 2024

00:23:08.520 Republican nomination? And so far, he's done a very good job of putting himself in that position.

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00:23:42.860 shipping. Limited time only, exclusions do apply. Now, when we want to fight back on the culture,

00:23:48.660 when we want to settle all sorts of norms, okay, how do we do it? We don't just criticize the

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00:23:57.560 we've made recently is What is a Woman by Matt Walsh. If you want to watch that movie and others,

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00:24:40.460 I'm so sorry. It has just come to my attention that I forgot to wish you all a happy Junty 1st.

00:24:57.980 It is Junty 1st today. We are observing the holiday. Yesterday was Junty 1st. I also didn't mention

00:25:05.020 Junty 1st. And then of course, Junty 1st was the day that the federal government has decided that we

00:25:09.500 would celebrate Juneteenth, which is now a federal holiday. It occurred the day before on a Sunday.

00:25:14.040 And so Juneteenth was observed on Monday, Junty 1st. And we are now discussing it here on Tuesday,

00:25:19.980 Junty 1st. And if, depending on how you react to this segment, I might be able to answer more of

00:25:25.460 your questions tomorrow on Junty 2nd. Junty 2nd before Junty 3rd and Junty 4th.

00:25:31.580 I know, I know that Republicans want to embrace Juneteenth. There are many Republicans who are

00:25:39.740 embracing Juneteenth. You know, that really sacred feast day that no one had heard about until five

00:25:44.680 minutes ago when the Libs invented it. They want to, Republicans want to embrace Juneteenth

00:25:49.640 because one, it's supposed to be about freeing the slaves. The Republican Party freed the slaves.

00:25:54.780 And two, we just don't want to be called racist. We are called racist all the time, unjustly by the

00:26:00.380 Dems. And it bothers us even when we say that it doesn't bother us. And we want any opportunity

00:26:04.940 to show the Libs that we're, actually Democrats are the real racists and we're not racist. But it's

00:26:11.020 just, Juneteenth is just a bad idea. It's a dumb holiday. And the only point of Juneteenth is to make

00:26:20.920 slavery, to put slavery more at the center of the American story, to emphasize the role of slavery

00:26:27.780 in America, and crucially to emphasize the importance of the legacy of slavery when crafting

00:26:34.240 all of our future policies. That the holiday is not about celebrating America for abolishing slavery,

00:26:40.900 because it theoretically could be about that. If you had a holiday just to celebrate emancipation,

00:26:46.040 then you could say, well, yeah, it's about how great America is for abolishing slavery. But that's

00:26:49.800 not what it's about. Did you Google Juneteenth on Juneteenth? I did. I Googled Juneteenth and there

00:26:54.960 was a new doodle or a new animation on Google. There was all sorts of African flags, the kind of

00:27:03.380 African black nationalist flag, the red and the green and the black. And it was there. And those were all

00:27:09.140 the colors that you saw on the image search, on the page itself. It wasn't a lot of American flags.

00:27:14.520 It wasn't. Why is it that Juneteenth was pushed by the Libs? Some conservatives acquiesced to it. But

00:27:25.100 it's not like this was a movement that came out of the conservative side of the aisle or the Republican

00:27:29.000 party. It was pushed by the Libs. And the Libs are the ones that celebrate it. Why? Because the point

00:27:35.100 of the holiday is to say that America is all about slavery. Slavery not only was not unique to America,

00:27:42.300 America, but it's not even particularly distinctive. I don't need to tell you this. I've said it many

00:27:51.320 times, but every country in the history of the world has had slavery at some point. Many countries

00:27:55.500 still do. What makes the West unique is that we abolished slavery. Slavery still exists in Africa.

00:28:01.840 It still exists in Asia. It still exists in certain indigenous cultures. And yet, the left in this

00:28:10.740 country, which hates America, tries to make slavery the entire American story. So I just think it's a

00:28:17.880 bad idea. It's also historically a sort of dumb day to celebrate the end of slavery, because it doesn't

00:28:22.720 mark the end of slavery. You could say slavery ends with the Emancipation Proclamation. That

00:28:28.280 happened before Juneteenth, long before Juneteenth. You could say slavery really officially ends with

00:28:33.300 the passage of the 13th Amendment that happens after, long after Juneteenth. Juneteenth is just

00:28:38.540 the day that the mail got to parts of Texas to tell the slaves that they had been freed prior.

00:28:45.400 It has been, in some parts of Texas, a local tradition dating back sometime, in a lot of the state

00:28:55.940 decades. But you could say in parts even earlier than that. But the only reason it's a federal holiday now

00:29:02.640 is to dunk on America and make America seem worse and more evil and say that America's best days are

00:29:09.640 going to be ahead of us in the past was awful, and we're an enslaving, terrible country. So I get it.

00:29:15.060 I know conservatives want to enjoy Juneteenth, but it's not there. As I've said, I get the argument

00:29:22.820 for Juneteenth because black people have a unique position in America in that black people,

00:29:27.920 the ancestors of black people were not people who chose to come here. They were, in large part,

00:29:34.720 brought here involuntarily. And I am not one of those conservatives who says that, you know,

00:29:40.440 well, that was then, this is now, forget about the past, let's only focus on the present and the

00:29:44.100 future. There might be some practical wisdom to that, but also history matters. I get it.

00:29:49.100 Is there any more conservative point of view than to observe that history and tradition and culture

00:29:54.720 and the link between the generations actually matters? No, of course, all those things do

00:30:00.340 matter. But the point of emancipation, the point of the 13th Amendment, the point of the

00:30:06.900 Reconstruction era is to say black people are Americans now. We have settled that question.

00:30:13.000 And so your Independence Day is the same Independence Day as the white people. It's the

00:30:17.540 same Independence Day as everyone else in America. It's July 4th. That's the day we're going to

00:30:22.280 celebrate. By creating a separate Independence Day, which is what Juneteenth is, the law creating

00:30:27.120 Juneteenth says it's the Juneteenth National Independence Day, is to say there's a separate

00:30:31.980 Independence Day for black people. The black people are not really Americans. We're not all just

00:30:35.780 Americans. There's actually a big distinction and we're never going to come together and we're never

00:30:39.020 going to be a real country. That's what the left wants it for. And that's a bad idea. It's not a good

00:30:44.240 idea. So it's a bad holiday. I much prefer Juneteenth and Juneteenth first and Juneteenth second.

00:30:48.920 Speaking of slavery and the legacy of slavery, Ibram X. Kendi, one of the most successful

00:30:57.320 hustlers, huckster, con artists in America, who's really enriched himself on white guilt and

00:31:04.500 liberal prattling on about slavery and legacy of slavery and race politics. Ibram Kendi says that

00:31:11.980 the fight to free the slaves is being reenacted today in the fight to take away your AR-15s.

00:31:20.640 I know you have a six-year-old daughter. So I wonder, how are you going to teach her what this

00:31:26.560 holiday is?

00:31:28.220 Well, I'm actually going to teach her that it's Freedom Day and that throughout this nation's

00:31:33.540 history, there's been two perspectives on freedom, really two fights for freedom.

00:31:38.480 Enslaved people were fighting for freedom from slavery and enslavers were fighting for the freedom

00:31:46.860 to enslave. And in many ways, that sort of contrast still exists today. There are people who are fighting

00:31:53.440 for freedom from assault rifles, freedom from poverty, freedom from exploitation. And there are others who

00:32:00.160 are fighting for freedom to exploit, freedom to have guns, freedom to maintain inequality. So I really

00:32:06.760 want to get her to understand that there are multiple kinds of freedom and she should be fighting for

00:32:13.240 and joining with those who are fighting for freedom from something like slavery.

00:32:18.100 As with almost everything Ibram Kendi says, this is a giant dumb point, a dumb stupid point with a little

00:32:28.000 kernel of a smart point hidden in there. So the comparison between taking away people's guns

00:32:35.140 and freeing the slaves is not only a silly and absurd comparison, but they're really sort of

00:32:42.480 opposite points. To have a gun, the whole reason to have a gun right there in the Second Amendment

00:32:49.180 is to protect yourself. It is to give yourself some independence so that you are not

00:32:55.380 easily enslaved and controlled. It's not to go hunting. It's not to go shooting clay pigeons.

00:33:03.120 It's to protect yourself. It's to defend your freedom, even in that traditional understanding

00:33:08.760 of freedom. But the smart point hidden inside all of Kendi's stupid demagoguery is that today,

00:33:18.440 the way we talk about freedom is very relativistic. The way we talk about freedom is kind of a zero-sum

00:33:27.700 game. When some people get freedom, other people lose freedom. And so freedom is not reasonable.

00:33:36.600 It's not logical. It's not tied to anything in objective reality. It's just about different

00:33:42.400 competing interests. The interests between the slavers and the enslaved, between the people who

00:33:47.940 want guns and the people who don't want guns. The people who, I don't know, want drugs and the people

00:33:51.860 who don't want drugs on the streets. That's the way that we do talk about freedom today. It's a stupid

00:33:56.760 view of freedom, though. Though it is how we talk about it. The freedom of the transgender man,

00:34:03.080 I'm sorry, transgender woman to use the women's bathroom, even though he's a dude. The freedom of

00:34:08.620 the transgender man, woman to swim on the girls' swim team, even though he's a dude, necessarily

00:34:14.720 infringes on the freedom of the women to have their own bathrooms and locker rooms where they can change

00:34:19.800 and don't need to have men expose their genitals to them. Or infringes on the freedom of women to have

00:34:25.040 their own swim teams and swimming leagues where they can win their own trophies and win their own

00:34:28.820 scholarships and not constantly be beaten by men. If freedom can describe all of those things,

00:34:36.900 then yes, those freedoms are in conflict. But that's why there is no such thing as a freedom

00:34:42.040 to transgenderism, as a right to transgenderism. The lib understanding of freedom as being able to do

00:34:52.260 whatever you want to do and just follow your own desires is just a false one. And you're especially

00:34:57.540 seeing this here. And Ibram Kendi is accidentally proving it to you. There's then the conservative

00:35:03.100 understanding of freedom, which is that freedom is not sinning. Freedom is doing good. Freedom is doing

00:35:12.040 what you're supposed to do. The man who sins is a slave to sin. That liberty, I've talked about this

00:35:18.360 on the show many times, that liberty is not licentiousness. That you don't have a right

00:35:23.140 to do something that is unreasonable and not to your benefit, as Edmund Burke says. You don't have

00:35:27.940 a right to pretend to be a woman and go into the woman's bathroom. You can't because it doesn't make

00:35:31.360 any sense because it's not true because you're not a woman. That's why you can't have a right to that.

00:35:37.340 Even if some crazy activist with all sorts of crazy colored hair and lots of piercings or whatever

00:35:42.580 and mutilated body parts says, I have a right to this. Well, no, you're just, that's just a thing

00:35:47.220 you're saying. So you can say you have a right to, but why do you have a right to that?

00:35:53.320 Why? There's no explanation. But a right that is inexplicable, a right that can't have some grounding

00:35:59.580 in objective reality in, say, the natural law is no right at all. That's no. So if we're going to,

00:36:05.940 if we're going to talk about real freedom, if we're going to talk about real rights,

00:36:08.960 we've got to ground it in reality. And that means we need to discard probably 90%

00:36:16.960 of the supposed rights that have cropped up in recent years and that continue to crop up every

00:36:22.560 day. Just like we need to discard 99% of the fake pronouns that have cropped up in recent years.

00:36:28.880 You can call yourself by those pronouns. Yesterday, we played a clip of a woman who calls herself,

00:36:34.600 refers to her pronouns as bun-bun-self. Bun-bun-self and fair-self and all

00:36:38.820 sorts of like just completely made up words. You can say that those are pronouns, but they're not

00:36:43.740 actually pronouns because pronouns are limited and they have something to do with objective reality.

00:36:52.940 There's a bell curve here for how to understand all of these problems in society,

00:36:57.400 our rancor over race and sex, our divisions, our seeming inability to communicate on what

00:37:03.980 constitutes a right and freedom and how we want to live and why we can't even decide what a man or a

00:37:08.080 woman is. Here's the bell curve. You've got the guy at the really stupid end of the IQ bell curve

00:37:15.680 and the guy's drooling and he can barely get his words out and he says,

00:37:20.040 duh, it's because no one believes in God anymore. Duh, it's because we're not going to church as much,

00:37:25.320 right? And then you've got the midwit in the middle who says, well, no, actually,

00:37:29.800 you know, there are all sorts of social reasons and it's because of advanced capitalism and because

00:37:33.020 of the way that the political economy is shaped and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then

00:37:36.940 you get to the high part of the IQ bell curve and you get the really super smart genius and you know

00:37:41.100 what he says? It's because people don't believe in God anymore. That's it. That's what it all comes

00:37:44.920 down to. I don't want to sound like a Bible thumper, like I'm preaching. I guess I am preaching to the

00:37:50.700 choir. That's just what it's all about. All political disagreements, all human conflict

00:37:57.440 comes down to theology and religion. Why? Especially when we're talking about Christianity,

00:38:04.580 when we're talking about certainly what I believe to be true religion, we're talking about a religion

00:38:10.720 that worships the logos, right? In the gospel of John, say in the beginning was the word and the

00:38:17.820 word is, that's a translation of the word logos, the divine logic of the universe. In the beginning

00:38:24.120 was the divine logic of the universe and the divine logic of the universe was with God and was God.

00:38:29.880 So this would be different than say Islam, which views Allah as pure will. Allah can do whatever

00:38:39.440 Allah wants to do. Allah, if he wanted to make his followers worship idols, that would have a sort of

00:38:46.440 sense in Islam. This was the subject of the Regensburg address, wonderful address by Pope Benedict. I think

00:38:53.240 probably the most important address of the 21st century, in which he quotes an Islamic scholar,

00:38:58.060 Ibn Hazm. That's a difference with Christianity, where God is logic as well. And therefore,

00:39:08.520 there necessarily must be a logical coherence to God. And we've got this Gallup poll right now,

00:39:17.240 as fewer Americans believe in God than ever before, expect society to make less sense.

00:39:23.240 Okay. At this point, I'd take an Islamic society over. I really don't mean to diss the Muslims. I

00:39:30.180 have a great deal of respect for a lot of religious Muslims because they believe in something and what

00:39:36.760 they believe in has a certain coherence to it. Certainly a hell of a lot more coherence than

00:39:41.260 what the liberals are pushing right now. It's just so amazing to me to hear from liberal people,

00:39:47.520 liberal atheists who will say, how can you believe in God? That's so crazy. You can't even see God.

00:39:52.700 I don't see physical evidence for God. And you say, well, actually there is a lot of physical

00:39:57.760 evidence and there's lots of, I say, oh, hold on. Wait, you're the people who believe in

00:40:01.060 transgenderism, right? So you won't believe that God exists without a specific kind of tangible

00:40:07.840 physical evidence that you're demanding. But you will believe that a giant, husky, hairy dude

00:40:13.820 is actually a woman in contradiction of all physical signs. Make that make sense to me. You cannot make

00:40:21.540 that make sense to me. It is truly shocking to me that anybody could believe such a thing, but it

00:40:30.540 makes sense because as, as belief in God goes away, that's going to affect everything in society.

00:40:38.460 Every settled thing, the relations between men and women, our understanding of our rights and where

00:40:45.540 our rights come from, our traditions, our holidays, our feast days, the very language that we use to

00:40:52.260 communicate notions of good and bad and right and wrong and true and false, all of that is going to

00:40:56.600 be questioned. None of that can be settled anymore. And so we're going to be debating the most elementary

00:41:02.900 things in our society constantly. And we'll have to try to prove it all through our unfettered reason.

00:41:08.360 But the stock of reason in each man is relatively small. So when we don't avail ourselves of the

00:41:13.900 wisdom of the ages and received opinion, then we're going to be trying to reinvent the whole world every

00:41:19.160 single day. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is going to be taking all of our energy, or he's going to be

00:41:24.400 rather taking all of our money by selling us his energy. You're going to have China taking huge

00:41:31.120 swaths of our manufacturing and our intellectual property and advancing on our interests. And

00:41:35.340 we're not going to be able to do a damn thing about it because we're going to be here still

00:41:39.120 arguing, duh, what's a woman? What's a, um, what is, what's reality? Just all these things that we

00:41:46.400 should have figured out when we were in kindergarten at the very latest, but, but we have not been able

00:41:51.500 to do that. Preschool, we should have figured it out. There's a video going around from

00:41:55.400 Libs of TikTok, our great friends over there, uh, of a preschool teacher, I guess a man, I think

00:42:03.620 a male preschool teacher who identifies as a woman who came out, came out to his preschool students

00:42:14.720 as trans. Today on the last day, I finally decided to come out to my kids and my kids are older.

00:42:21.460 They're four and five. And the way that he did is just read him a book about this teddy bear that,

00:42:26.960 uh, kind of comes out as a trans girl. And it's really nice and it's very simple. They understood

00:42:32.260 it right away. And I think what made me cry the most was that afterwards, like I kind of looked

00:42:37.000 at them and there was just a silence in the room. And I just thought like, Oh my God, now they see me

00:42:40.740 as a totally different person. And before this, they loved me. I was such a, you know, one of their

00:42:46.740 favorite teachers and it felt so good to have that. And I think that's one of the biggest fears I had

00:42:51.440 is that as soon as they found out about me, they would lose all love for me. And then one of my

00:42:56.240 kids breaks the silence and she gets up and she just is like, she just hugs me. And she's just like,

00:43:01.520 everyone give Ruti a hug. And they all came and they gave me a hug. And she was just like,

00:43:06.060 we love you. Like, we love you so much. And I'm, I'm, yeah, I've, it made me really emotional.

00:43:11.940 And it was, I think one of the biggest moments in my transition where I truly felt like

00:43:16.440 at peace with, um, with who I am and that like, even kids can understand it and even kids

00:43:23.500 can accept me. And so it doesn't make any sense when adults can't because of a kid can,

00:43:29.160 why can't a adult understand and accept? Because kids are idiots. That's why, why,

00:43:37.380 why can a, why can a four year old or a three year old just unquestioningly believe that I am

00:43:45.400 a woman, but an adult with developed faculties of reason and a clearer perception of the world

00:43:52.820 doesn't understand that because, because the kids are, are little tiny kids who don't know the

00:43:59.480 difference between cartoons and reality. Because they're, they, they, they believe this is a family

00:44:07.260 show and kids listen to it. So I don't want to, I don't want to say, I want to dispel some of the

00:44:11.800 illusions of childhood, you know, like certain characters and things that be, but like kids

00:44:15.620 believe in a lot of stuff that isn't true. Okay. That's why. And if you find yourself,

00:44:21.220 if you find yourself in a position where the, the, the only people who will believe your shtick,

00:44:30.300 your, your perception of the world are little tiny kids and people over the age of four do not,

00:44:36.500 then you should probably reconsider your point of view. Furthermore, furthermore, if, if you need

00:44:43.200 the affirmation of kids for your sex life, you should not be around little kids. If you are

00:44:53.980 breaking down in tears, so happy when you make a sexual confession to, to three and four year olds,

00:45:00.840 and then they come up and hug you. And that gives you a feeling of great pleasure. And you're a man who

00:45:06.920 thinks that he is a woman. I think in this case, again, I don't really know the details of it.

00:45:10.600 But you for sure should not be around kids ever at all. You should be hundreds of yards away at any

00:45:18.660 given time. We, there was a clip. Do you remember when Fox news ran that bizarre pro transing the

00:45:27.200 kids segment, just full throated endorsement of transing little tiny kids the other day? It was

00:45:32.220 very strange and they haven't answered for it at all. Tucker's been great on it. Tucker's just

00:45:36.320 been sort of sub tweeting them. Tucker's just been running segments on why, why we should not

00:45:44.040 trans the kids. But anyway, Fox news ran this bizarre segment. And at the end of it, the, the

00:45:50.080 reporter who was pushing this stuff, he said, people only fear what they don't understand.

00:45:54.000 That's what this is about, which I guess can be true. But people also fear things that they do

00:46:00.340 understand. I, I fear sharks. If I'm in the water and a shark, I see a shark fin, I am going to fear

00:46:09.500 that. Not because I don't understand the shark, but because I do understand the shark. And I know

00:46:15.980 that that shark wants to eat me. And it is very much the same way with gender ideology. We don't

00:46:22.220 fear. It's not even that we've, we hold it in a program and we want to stop it. We fear what it

00:46:25.620 could do to society. We don't fear it because we just don't understand it. I do understand it in

00:46:30.320 as much as it can be understood. It's the claim that a man can really be a woman despite his body

00:46:35.200 because his body has nothing to do with his soul. I get that. That same heresy has cropped up many

00:46:40.620 times over the last 2000 years. I, I understand that. I have a, it's not a phobia. It's a very

00:46:45.600 legitimate, rational fear of what that can do to society. Even beyond the sex question of screwing up

00:46:50.660 the kids and, and sterilizing them and ruining their bodies and messing with their brains.

00:46:54.940 Just the very idea that the physical world has nothing to do with our true selves.

00:46:58.900 That idea when it has cropped up has, has really threatened civilization. Sometimes we object to

00:47:06.500 things because we understand them. Actually, sometimes we need to elevate our thinking beyond

00:47:13.780 the thinking of three and four year olds and beyond the same stupid basic questions that we shouldn't even

00:47:19.120 be asking in the first place because they should be settled. And only then can we think about more

00:47:23.740 advanced things. We can take on adult sort of behaviors and adult debates, or we can keep

00:47:31.380 pretending that we're five years old and our enemies are going to eat our lunch. The choice,

00:47:35.540 I suppose, is ours. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.

00:47:38.940 If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the

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00:48:05.560 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies. Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:48:10.560 Supervising producer, Mathis Glover. Production manager, Pavel Vidovsky. Editor and associate

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00:48:26.540 copyright Daily Wire 2022. Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, The Washington Post accidentally

00:48:31.620 promotes a pro-life message in an article meant to rip Texas' anti-abortion law.

00:48:35.080 The Navy pushes alternative pronouns. And Joe Biden gets ticked when asked about the

00:48:39.060 Joe session. That's today on The Ben Shapiro Show. Give it a listen.

Ep. 1031 - Burning Coal To Keep Lib Pipe Dreams Alive

Summary

Transcript