The Michael Knowles Show

00:00:00.000 This time, I truly hate to say I told you so. For months, years at this point, some of us on

00:00:06.760 the right have warned that liberal elites want to make us all eat bugs. The World Economic Forum

00:00:12.140 in particular has pushed this agenda. Eat the bugs, live in the pod, all nothing and be happy.

00:00:19.520 But lots of other people have done it too. Public health figures, celebrities, the establishment

00:00:24.660 media, and many people laughed this off as some sort of crazy conspiracy. Well, what do you know?

00:00:34.500 Europe is now officially eating the bugs. The European Union has officially enacted a statute

00:00:42.480 allowing food producers to incorporate cricket powder into flour-based products. Bread, crackers,

00:00:50.400 cereal bars, biscuits, beer-like beverages, chocolate, soups, sauces, a bunch of other

00:00:56.920 items. They just grind up the crickets, guts, and excrement and all, and then pack them into your

00:01:04.280 food. Now, it is not exactly mandatory. But it kind of is. Because many, if not most people,

00:01:13.120 are going to end up eating the bugs without even knowing it. Think about all the bizarre junk that

00:01:18.860 is already packed into your food. Seed oils, preservatives, polysyllabic chemicals that

00:01:24.340 most people can't even pronounce, let alone identify. Well, now they're adding ground up

00:01:30.520 crickets. And there isn't much most people can do about it. And not only are the crickets gross,

00:01:36.560 but some people might be allergic to them. Some people might be extremely allergic to them.

00:01:41.320 Evidence on allergic reactions has been inconclusive according to the studies,

00:01:45.320 but the political elites don't care. They're going to go ahead with the plan anyway.

00:01:50.200 No surprise there. These are the same sort of people who spent 22 years pumping little kids

00:01:54.760 full of puberty blockers before thinking that maybe it might be a good idea to test those chemicals

00:01:59.700 on animals. That's what we discussed yesterday on the show. These are the same people who pumped

00:02:04.120 over five and a half billion people with an experimental drug on the promise that it was safe and

00:02:10.960 effective at stopping COVID, neither of which claim was true. Now they insist that everybody

00:02:16.080 eat bugs because the bugs are allegedly more nutritionally efficient than grains and meats

00:02:23.860 and normal stuff. They claim it's better for the environment. We got to do it.

00:02:29.580 But of course, food is about more than efficiency because human beings are more than just meat

00:02:35.780 sacks in need of calories. Food is about taste, tradition, ritual, family. Food is one of the

00:02:45.500 most basic aspects of culture, which is precisely the reason the libs are so eager to change it.

00:02:52.820 I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:03:01.560 Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday is from Rustman, who says,

00:03:05.060 someone should let Stephen King know that the Bible is banned in schools so he can let all the kids

00:03:10.240 know to run out and read it. It's true. They always want you to read the banned books,

00:03:13.700 but only the gay porn stuff, only the really bad banned books. Whenever you point out that some good

00:03:18.500 books are banned in very important places like public schools, then they say, oh, no, never mind.

00:03:23.360 Forget about that. No, don't read that. That's bad. You got to read the gay porn. It's very,

00:03:27.720 very important. It's hard to keep up. You know, when I want to read anything for a long period of time,

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00:04:35.500 stores near you. Black Rifle Coffee, America's coffee. People have misunderstood the bugs push from

00:04:42.820 the beginning. A lot of people didn't believe the bugs thing would happen because bugs are gross and

00:04:47.560 nobody wants to eat them. But one, they're not going to just serve you bugs right away. They're

00:04:52.580 going to grind them up into little powder and just put them into your cookies and your breads and not

00:04:56.800 even probably tell you about it. Or if they'll list it on the ingredients list on the back in the tiny

00:05:03.760 font, you're not going to know about it in many cases. But then the other reason they said that a lot

00:05:09.940 of people have resisted this idea that we're going to eat the bugs is they say, well, I don't know.

00:05:15.240 So the bugs are such a taboo in our culture. Sure, other cultures around the world eat bugs,

00:05:20.800 but we in the West, we don't do it. And so what? The libs, they think it's more nutritionally

00:05:26.800 efficient. They think it's better for the environment. So they're going to try to make

00:05:29.260 us eat bugs despite how much eating bugs would violate our taboos. That misses the point too.

00:05:36.640 The libs are not trying to get us to eat the bugs despite the fact that that violates our taboos.

00:05:41.020 They're trying to get us to eat the bugs precisely because it violates our taboos.

00:05:46.860 They're doing it because taboos and standards and norms define culture. And the libs project

00:05:52.400 is to completely upend our culture. And so the most direct way to upend our culture

00:05:57.180 is to reorder the taboos. And one of the most basic aspects of culture is food.

00:06:03.380 They're doing it because it's gross. They're doing it because it's gross. And they're going to wield

00:06:08.820 power over you. And they're going to change the very definition of the culture that you hold dear

00:06:14.700 that they don't like. Speaking of food, a conservative commentator, Jono Caldwell,

00:06:21.420 was just booted out of a restaurant. Now, Jono happens to be black. Was he booted out because

00:06:26.420 he's black? No. This isn't the Woolworths lunch counter. This isn't the 1950s or 60s. No.

00:06:32.260 Was he booted out because he's a man? I don't think so. Now, these days, men can go anywhere.

00:06:39.480 They can go to the women's locker room. They can go to the girls' bathroom. No, you know why he was

00:06:42.960 booted out. He was booted out because he's conservative. Yesterday, as we were having

00:06:48.680 breakfast at this particular location, which I had never been to, it was the suggestion to them

00:06:54.100 to visit this particular place. One of the owners came over to the table and told us

00:06:59.720 how she had been listening to our conversation. We were not welcome there. And I said to her,

00:07:05.400 I said, did I say something that was triggering to you? She said, no. She said, our politics aren't

00:07:11.900 aligned. I'm one of the owners. I'm an owner here. I don't feel comfortable. You have to leave.

00:07:16.780 So then I stood up, I walked out, and so did the rest of my group. She told me that I needed to get

00:07:23.020 out of her establishment. If this was not the Jim Crow South, I couldn't tell much of a difference.

00:07:28.720 Ron DeSantis said, in Florida, discrimination is not allowed, and I hope that they're going to look

00:07:33.580 closely to what happened here at this restaurant.

00:07:37.360 So he's booted out because he's conservative. A lot of people are asking, how is this legal?

00:07:41.300 Well, the reason it's legal is there is no civil rights protection for a political point of view.

00:07:47.260 You can't go to a court and say, I was discriminated against on the basis of my political

00:07:52.020 views. It's not protected. Race is protected. Religion is protected. Sex is protected.

00:07:57.420 Protected sexual orientation and gender identity in the wake of the Vostok decision.

00:08:02.620 Thank you, Neil Gorsuch. That is protected. But political views are not.

00:08:10.260 This is a reminder that one of the big stories about the civil rights revolution is not true.

00:08:18.840 The big line about the civil rights revolution, and you might consider this a positive,

00:08:23.220 you might consider this a negative. You might say, well, it had some good effects,

00:08:25.800 but it actually had some bad effects too, is that it gets rid of freedom of association

00:08:30.120 as an essential part of the American political order. Prior to the civil rights revolution,

00:08:37.760 if you didn't want to let somebody into your store, if you didn't want to let somebody into

00:08:41.980 your hotel, if you didn't want to let somebody to your lunch counter, you didn't have to do it.

00:08:46.000 And in the 1960s, people looked at that and said, oh, that's kind of ugly because some people are

00:08:51.620 keeping black people out of the lunch counters, and that doesn't seem right. So we're going to get

00:08:55.800 rid of that. And most people said, okay, that's a good thing. But there's a cost to everything in

00:09:01.800 this world. And so when you get rid of freedom of association, you are, maybe you're improving

00:09:07.280 certain social situations, but you might be eroding some of the principles that all Americans hold very

00:09:17.700 dear. And you might not even be totally getting rid of freedom of association. Right now, a black guy

00:09:27.420 can't be kicked out of a lunch counter. That's a good thing. But a black guy who's a conservative can.

00:09:32.280 A conservative of any stripe can be kicked out of a lunch counter. A white male could be kicked out of a

00:09:43.180 public accommodation. It has been known to happen. You saw this especially during BLM and all the George

00:09:49.600 Floyd riots. People saying this is a black space, white people not allowed here. You're seeing this crop up

00:09:55.120 on universities, black only dorms, black only spaces, white people not allowed. How's that legal?

00:10:02.080 Well, it's not legal by the letter of the law, but nobody's going to enforce it. If any restaurant

00:10:07.780 kicked out a lib, you know there would be a major lawsuit and the litigant would probably win.

00:10:13.660 And the way that they would win is they would pretend that they were being booted out for some

00:10:18.160 other reason. Be some lib, you know, with purple hair and crazy piercings and an Antifa shirt screaming

00:10:25.380 about burning down the establishment. You say, hey, lib, can you please get out of here? This is,

00:10:29.040 you're creating a nuisance. And you know what the lib would say. The lib would say, well, you're only

00:10:33.020 doing this because I'm trans or I'm a lesbian or I'm this color or I'm that race or I'm whatever.

00:10:38.920 And you know that they would win because the system is set up that way where there are just two tracks

00:10:45.800 here. If you attack anything that is conservative, traditional, pushing back against the cultural

00:10:55.180 revolution, you can and usually will be punished. If you're the one pushing that revolution, you're good.

00:11:02.960 You're safe. We talked about this yesterday when Stephen King, it was invading against banning books.

00:11:09.060 And everyone seems to think that they're against banning books. That's not true.

00:11:13.220 We ban books in this culture. We ban the most important book. We ban the Bible in public schools.

00:11:17.580 Well, that's different. We kick people out of our lunch counters if they're conservative.

00:11:27.040 The Daily Wire, we were booted out of a restaurant. We'd put a deposit down on this restaurant to have

00:11:32.840 a dinner before our company Christmas party. And then they found out who we were and they said,

00:11:37.660 you're not welcome here. You guys, because you're conservative. You're not allowed into the

00:11:41.660 restaurant. And our protest, our big standing up against the man was Jeremy and Ben and Drew and

00:11:47.380 I forget if Candace was there. Spencer, a number of us went in afterward and just had a drink.

00:11:54.300 They were too cowardly to actually kick us out. But this happens, okay? This sort of thing happens.

00:11:59.760 This reordering of the political order, it didn't create justice for all. It just created

00:12:06.800 an opportunity to attack conservatives of any race, of any geography, of any kind of background.

00:12:17.600 If they oppose the revolution, they're going down. The revolution has been televised. And the revolution

00:12:24.380 can be communicated across all various media, including phone to phone. That's why you got to

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00:13:32.380 I have been banned by another university. You know, every year I speak at a number of college

00:13:40.880 campuses. I do this with Young America's Foundation. I've done this for years at this

00:13:45.400 point. And if I got a little more time, sometimes I'll do, I don't know, I could do up to 10 schools

00:13:51.520 a semester. If I've got more work here at DW, they don't want to let me out, I'll do, I'll at least

00:13:56.900 do four or five schools a semester. Well, I guess I'm doing one fewer this year because Penn State

00:14:01.800 says that I'm not coming. Even though the students invited me, they submitted their proposal to the

00:14:07.060 school. I actually didn't know that I had been invited to Penn State until after they told me

00:14:12.160 that I couldn't come. This is Penn State University, Harrisburg. They claim that they have the exclusive

00:14:18.280 right to deny a campus lecture from me. Yours truly, they say, any event considered potentially

00:14:24.480 harmful to the public image of Penn State, Harrisburg will be rejected. Me, they want to

00:14:29.580 ban me whom everybody loves so. Can you imagine that? Shocking, absolutely shocking. This is

00:14:36.840 illegal. Penn State is a public university. They have no right to do this. The students do have a

00:14:42.100 right at this public university to invite me to the school. And what they wanted me to speak on

00:14:46.700 is my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is, there we go, thank you.

00:14:50.780 Number one national bestseller, very mainstream book. It's a book on the history and meaning of

00:14:55.000 language. Not exactly a bomb-throwing kind of topic, is it? If anything, it's a little bit dry.

00:15:01.620 They said, no, it's too much. This could harm the image of the university. Okay, so does Penn State

00:15:10.480 have any speakers come? They do. Who are some of the other speakers that have come on campus recently

00:15:15.660 that have not harmed the public image of the university? Well, let's see. We've got Drag

00:15:21.020 Bingo, the Student Engagement Office and Student Government hosted Drag Bingo. They hosted an LGBTQ

00:15:28.840 panel hosted by Mix, not Mr. or Mrs. or Miss, Mix Jacob Kelly, who is a queer inclusive sex educator.

00:15:37.860 That didn't harm the public image of the university. It's not even that they won't have

00:15:43.780 explicitly political events. There was a lecture by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, which is a far-left

00:15:50.460 TV and radio program. That was totally fine. So I think I've figured out what we're going to do.

00:15:56.840 We're going to have to reapply. I mean, I didn't apply at all. It was the students who applied on my

00:16:00.000 behalf. So if they're listening right now, what I want you to do, I want you to just change my pronouns

00:16:05.400 in the application. Instead of Mr. Michael Knowles, you say Mix, Mix, Michaela, Michelle Knowles. And

00:16:13.760 then I'll just show up there and I'll wear some stilettos. And I'll say this is an inclusive event.

00:16:18.960 And then I can give my lecture on the history of language. And I think then everybody, it'll totally

00:16:22.340 work out, right? Sounds great to me. They're still keeping this up. That's a public university.

00:16:29.040 It's a public university. Last year, a Catholic university banned me. I had been invited to St.

00:16:36.300 Thomas University in Minnesota. They banned me because I espouse Catholic dogma. I'm not joking.

00:16:45.880 Because I don't think that boys can become girls, because I hold to unchangeable Catholic beliefs on

00:16:53.600 a basic question of human nature. They said I'm not welcome at the Catholic university.

00:16:59.040 Not only are we booted out of the weird liberal private schools, we're booted out of the nominally

00:17:06.020 Catholic and conservative schools, and we're booted out of public accommodations. Expect more of that.

00:17:11.060 Expect, if you haven't already, expect to be in John O. Caldwell's position or the Daily Wire's position

00:17:16.160 soon enough. Freedom of association for them, but not for us. That's how it's going to go.

00:17:23.200 And they are going to ostracize us as much as they can. And until conservatives recognize

00:17:28.500 that it's probably a little pastime for us to wield political power through the same sort of

00:17:35.480 processes that the left wielded political power, albeit we should do so in a just and moral way.

00:17:41.680 Until we recognize that, as long as we just keep saying, well, you know, come on, this isn't fair.

00:17:46.880 Look at this double standard. This is hypocrisy. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. As long

00:17:50.760 as we keep doing that, we're going to lose. And we're not going to get to go to universities,

00:17:54.740 which might be a blessing in disguise. And we're not going to get to go to restaurants,

00:17:58.260 and we're going to be forced to eat the bugs, and things are not going to turn out very well

00:18:01.720 at all. Speaking of education, perfect timing on this story. This story is so delightful to me.

00:18:08.420 I mentioned yesterday that ChatGPT, which is a very mainstream AI, artificial intelligence program,

00:18:14.240 was able to get a pretty good grade on a Wharton business school exam. This is an exam from

00:18:22.360 probably the top business school in the country. And ChatGPT was able to get a B or a B minus on the

00:18:29.020 exams. So ChatGPT took some other exams. They took a medical license exam and the bar exam to become a

00:18:35.620 lawyer. And ChatGPT passed. Got a passing score or a very close to passing score on both tests.

00:18:45.200 That was true on all three components of the United States medical licensing exam,

00:18:50.020 which is a test that physicians holding doctor of medicine degrees must pass for medical licensure.

00:18:57.060 The app passed it without, quote, any specialized training or reinforcement.

00:19:01.380 It also passed multiple bar exams for different states. Humans with seven years of post-secondary

00:19:11.080 education and bar exam-specific training were able to get 68% of questions right on these bar exams.

00:19:20.960 ChatGPT, which is just a computer with no specific training, got 50.3% of the questions right.

00:19:26.740 And then if you looked at the top two or three choices that the model selected for these questions,

00:19:34.340 they were right 71% to 88% of the time, which what that tells you is that it's not just that

00:19:42.260 the machine was randomly guessing because 71% and 88% far surpasses the baseline guessing rate.

00:19:49.220 I love this. I love this because it contradicts the whole World Economic Forum elite Davos line,

00:19:55.580 which is that in the future, all you useless people, you poor people, you manufacturers,

00:20:01.060 you service people, you're going to be useless. We'll give you drugs and video games. You won't.

00:20:06.840 You don't. Just go away. We'll pay you to go away. Robots are going to do it.

00:20:11.540 Uh-uh. It's not the waiters who are going to get replaced by the robots. It's you. It's the

00:20:15.500 accountants. It's the CFOs. It's the lawyers in many cases. It's the white-collar workers.

00:20:24.940 It's the middle managers. Those are the people who will in many cases be replaced, but not in all

00:20:30.400 cases. And this is the other takeaway, I think, from this. And it's a really important takeaway

00:20:35.500 as we think about artificial intelligence, which has proven itself much more impressive than even

00:20:40.640 I thought it would be. The way that artificial intelligence can render art, can render paintings

00:20:47.200 and drawings and images. On some of the public programs, it's not extremely impressive. On the

00:20:52.720 private programs, it's unbelievable. Some of my friends work in artificial intelligence. They've

00:20:58.240 shown me some of what they're working on. The way that a computer now can write a poem,

00:21:03.060 can paint a picture, it is shocking. And so it's been very impressive.

00:21:06.440 But that doesn't mean it's the end of the line for human beings. And in fact, the advances

00:21:13.280 of AI, I think, show us something really important about what it means to be human. Because are

00:21:19.680 you going to hire a robot to be your lawyer or to be your doctor? In some cases, maybe you

00:21:26.920 would. If you've just got to write up a basic legal document, maybe you would get a robot to

00:21:31.900 do that. If you just need a kind of basic checkup or some really simple aspect of medicine,

00:21:38.460 maybe you would have a robot do that. But when it comes to, I don't know, a negotiation,

00:21:43.880 contract negotiations have been in the news recently. When it comes to a contract negotiation,

00:21:48.280 when it comes to establishing a legal framework for your business, when it comes to deciding between

00:21:54.900 one course of action for your business or another, or for a lawsuit or for another,

00:21:59.640 when it comes to sophisticated medical decisions that require real ethical consideration,

00:22:07.240 end of life decisions, maybe decisions for children. Do you get vaccinated? Do you not get

00:22:13.240 vaccinated? Do you have this procedure? Do you not? You probably don't want a robot making those

00:22:17.500 decisions. And the reason for that is that law and medicine are not just about facts and science.

00:22:26.740 The libs want us to believe that everything is just about facts, facts and science and statistics

00:22:34.400 and the whole world. If we just got to plug the whole world into a computer, it'll make all our

00:22:39.240 decisions for us, and then we can just lie back and do nothing. But no, there is more to life than

00:22:43.760 facts. There is more to life, much more to life than science. You hear me say it on the show a lot,

00:22:50.080 statistics are fake. Statistics are, at least 175% of statistics are completely made up and ridiculous

00:22:56.380 and pointless. Even when it comes to the law, conservatives have fallen into this facts-only,

00:23:02.740 science-only, scientistic view of the world, but it's a mistake. You see this in the obsession with

00:23:08.200 textualism and originalism in law, all of which derive from legal positivism, this obsession with just

00:23:16.200 the ink on the paper of a statute. But that's not all there is to the law. There is the lex of the

00:23:22.720 law. There is the statute as it's written and the constitution as it's written. But then there is the

00:23:27.960 use, to use the Latin. Then there is the background principles of the law. Then there is the natural law.

00:23:36.620 Then there is our moral intuition. Then there is the fact that judges are judges precisely for their

00:23:40.840 judgment, to apply prudence and wisdom. That doctors are supposed to have a bedside manner and are

00:23:46.600 supposed to use their judgment and they have to take ethics courses. They don't take nearly enough

00:23:50.340 ethics courses. That there is a human component here that necessarily is missing from a computer.

00:24:00.960 That it's not all, you can't just plug life into a computer and expect a perfect outcome at the end.

00:24:08.280 Life is too chaotic and complex and transcendent of merely physical, scientistic considerations.

00:24:16.900 There's more to life than just atoms and facts. Speaking of transcending scientism,

00:24:25.700 middle-aged white guys are killing themselves at a very high rate, at an increasingly high rate.

00:24:30.480 We've talked about this for years. This has led in large part to the decline in the American life

00:24:39.920 expectancy. We've now had several years in recent memory where the life expectancy has decreased.

00:24:47.480 This really just started for the first time, not that long ago. Why? Because of deaths of despair

00:24:53.460 among middle-aged white Americans. Well, now there's a study. It's a new study. And so,

00:25:00.040 when there's a study, then we can finally believe it. There's a study out that shows that a major

00:25:07.960 driver of these deaths of despair for middle-aged white guys is loss of religion. In other words,

00:25:14.020 there's now a scientific study to prove what normal people have intuited the whole time.

00:25:20.820 What anybody with two brain cells and any even iota of common sense has known from the very beginning.

00:25:28.300 When you lose hope, you despair. Because despair means a loss of hope.

00:25:37.000 Shocking, but stop the presses. This paper was just circulated by the National Bureau of Economic

00:25:41.980 Research, found that the increase in deaths of despair among middle-aged white Americans, which

00:25:45.720 started in the early 90s, was the aftermath of a declining religiosity in the United States,

00:25:51.340 specifically by the same group. It's true that religion in general has declined, but especially

00:25:55.360 for these now middle-aged white guys, they left the church in very large numbers. You might be able

00:26:01.300 to think of your own memories, depending on how you were raised, of maybe you went to church as a

00:26:07.080 kid, maybe you didn't. And even if you did, did daddy always go to church? I bet in a lot of cases,

00:26:13.360 it was just mommy took the kids to church and daddy stayed home and watched football.

00:26:17.560 That phenomenon exploded over the last 30 years. Why did this happen? Why did this group

00:26:24.020 leave the church? I think in large part, that group left the church because of supposed reforms

00:26:30.920 of the churches that went on during the 1960s. You certainly saw this in the mainline Protestant

00:26:37.260 churches, which at this point are basically like LGBT far-left morning tea hour. I think of the

00:26:45.400 poor Episcopalians or the Methodists, and certain shades of Presbyterians have gone completely over

00:26:53.380 the edge. You saw this in the Catholic church too, even with the weight of 2,000 years of inertia

00:26:58.200 in the magisterium and divine institution, certainly in my view. Even then, you saw in the wake of the

00:27:05.560 Second Vatican Council liturgical deformations that made even the Holy Mass kind of effeminate

00:27:16.100 and shallow, much more shallow than the tradition. You completely changed the orientation of the Mass.

00:27:24.620 You now have the priest facing away from the altar, facing the people, frequently telling jokes,

00:27:29.280 as a priest friend of mine once described, telling jokes like a ham actor in a dying vaudeville show

00:27:34.660 who would do well to limit his repertoire to the little barbs that St. John told the Blessed Mother

00:27:39.540 while her son bled on the cross. I think it drives the point home pretty well. You replaced beautiful

00:27:45.280 singing and serious chanting and elevating music with a bunch of mariachi bands and these lame,

00:27:51.580 insipid ditties from the 1970s that weren't even cool 50 years ago. And then you expect a man to go

00:27:57.700 there, a man who had previously been singing good old proper hymns, good old English hymns or older

00:28:06.540 chanting. And then he goes there and he's got to sing these 70 songs, I will raise you up on eagle's

00:28:14.380 wings. And it's just so lame. And the only people that that kind of deformation appeals to are squishes

00:28:21.120 and libs and women, you know, and, and only a specific subset of women who, who do not speak

00:28:29.400 to a traditional and certainly not to a masculine culture. So for these reasons and more, men leave

00:28:34.240 the church and now they're, they're depressed and killing themselves. There's a political aspect to

00:28:39.660 this as well though. This group of economists looked at the impact of blue laws across the country

00:28:44.500 and how the increased repeal of blue laws are followed by a loss in church attendance and an

00:28:52.120 increased secularization. So we all agree, I think we could, even if you're an atheist or an agnostic,

00:28:57.040 you don't go to church. You can, it's very easy for people to see how a change in the culture of the

00:29:02.880 church can lead people to leave the church. What's a little harder for people to accept is how political

00:29:11.840 changes, changes in the government and the political order, even outside of the church can drive this

00:29:18.040 sort of thing. But it does, as I have tried to make clear for years. Politics is downstream of

00:29:25.700 culture. Sure, that's true. Movies and songs and rituals and things certainly affect the kind of laws

00:29:32.700 that we're going to pass. But I do find that phrase to be a little bit of a libertarian cope

00:29:38.220 and an excuse not to engage in the political order, not to wield just political power on the

00:29:43.400 happy occasions that people give it to us. Because politics, though downstream of culture in some

00:29:49.500 ways, politics can also lead the culture. Culture can be downstream of politics as well.

00:29:55.880 East Germany is atheist today. West Germany is mostly religious, though of a kind of confused

00:30:02.740 religiosity. Nevertheless, more than half of West Germans would call themselves religious. Why is that?

00:30:07.900 Is that because of regional variations in Bratwurst? No. It's because godless communism was the

00:30:13.800 dominant regime in East Germany for much of the last century. And even after the Berlin Wall falls

00:30:20.500 down, there are after effects of that from the political order onto the culture. So what do we do

00:30:27.140 about it? I think we've got to take on both issues. Yes, well, at a personal level, yes, we should work on our

00:30:34.740 own inner spiritual life. Of course, I'm not, I don't mean to diminish that. And then from the cultural

00:30:40.440 level, cult referring to cults referring even at a deep level to religion, we need to reform the

00:30:47.340 churches so that they are more serious and reverent and conducive to men going to church. And we've got

00:30:56.840 to change the political order such that the incentives in our political order are to go to

00:31:05.060 church, are to have belief, are to have hope, are to be good citizens, are to perform acts of charity

00:31:10.300 for one another, are oriented toward the common good. There's no neutrality here. The government is

00:31:16.440 always going to be creating incentives and disincentives to different actions. For all of

00:31:20.720 American history, we had incentives toward all of those good things and disincentives toward the

00:31:26.020 opposite. We had, we had blue laws. We had, we had laws against adultery. We had blasphemy laws for

00:31:33.140 goodness sakes. Okay. So don't tell me that it's out of the American tradition to take these kinds of

00:31:37.880 issues seriously. That is the American tradition. But now what do we have? We don't have a neutral

00:31:41.620 political order. Now we've just got incentives for all the opposite stuff. We've got incentives for

00:31:45.520 people to leave their families. We've got incentives for people to do a bunch of drugs

00:31:49.620 and get involved in weird sex stuff and, and ignore the common good and only pursue their

00:31:55.540 own selfish interests. We've got interest. We've got incentives for that on the left and the right.

00:31:59.380 We've got it throughout the whole culture. We've got incentives for during the COVID lockdowns,

00:32:03.420 we shut down the churches. We keep the pot dispensaries open in California. Okay. Those,

00:32:08.260 those are completely skewed incentives and disincentives. And they're, it's having real effects.

00:32:13.580 I know that a lot of people who are a little, a little more skeptical of religion or they just,

00:32:20.300 that's, religion's not their thing. They say, oh, you know, Michael, come on, who cares? We've got

00:32:24.860 bigger issues to talk about. I don't know. Do you think there's a bigger political issue than

00:32:29.060 Americans dying than the average life expectancy decreasing that a huge group of Americans,

00:32:35.620 middle-aged white guys just killing themselves and ODing on drugs because of a loss of hope?

00:32:40.000 Is there any bigger political issue than the loss of hope, than the loss of faith and the loss of

00:32:47.640 charity, love, philia, central to any political order? Is that, I don't think there's anything,

00:32:53.900 I don't think tax rates are a bigger issue than that. I don't think deregulation is a bigger issue

00:32:57.900 than that. I don't, I don't, I don't think immigration is a bigger issue. Immigration is a big issue.

00:33:02.440 That the loss of faith, hope and charity, that it's kind of the whole game. And I think we ought

00:33:10.800 to pay a little bit more attention to it. Speaking of middle-aged white men, a couple of middle-aged

00:33:17.740 white men just lost their jobs. And that's a good thing. Generally, it's bad when middle-aged white

00:33:22.380 guys lose their jobs in America, but this time it's pretty good. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell just

00:33:28.580 lost their jobs on the House Intelligence Committee. This because the Republicans took

00:33:33.700 over the House. Kevin McCarthy is the Speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy said, listen, jerks,

00:33:37.460 both of you guys are off the Intel Committee. You shouldn't have security clearances. You shouldn't

00:33:41.560 be around any kind of sensitive information. Schiff, you're a liar who has mishandled classified

00:33:48.340 information for the entire Trump presidency. And Swalwell, you were doing weird stuff with a

00:33:53.780 Chinese spy. So neither of you guys can be trusted. Hakeem Jeffries, who's the Democrat

00:33:59.520 minority leader in the House, he came out. He said, this is a shocking upsetting of precedent.

00:34:04.660 You can't do this. The tradition, the precedent in the House is that the minority party gets to name

00:34:10.840 the people that it wants to the committees. And then the Speaker of the House is supposed to accept

00:34:16.860 that. This is awful. He says, it's my understanding that you intend to break with the longstanding

00:34:23.160 House tradition of deference to the minority party. You should honor past practice.

00:34:32.240 I'm glad to hear Hakeem Jeffries and the Libs mention honoring past practice for once in their

00:34:40.020 entire lives. This rings so hollow. Do the Libs honor anything about the past? The Libs hate the past.

00:34:48.640 The Libs spend all their time tearing down statues of the past and talking about how evil the past was.

00:34:52.960 And how anything that is traditional or conservative is just terrible. And we need to upend the whole

00:34:58.020 thing. Except for this. Except for Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell staying on the Intel committee. That's

00:35:03.400 just, that's the one historical precedent that we need to keep. I don't think so. I think this is

00:35:10.360 chickens coming home to roost, is what I think this is. And I think that when the Democrats, when Pelosi

00:35:17.180 set up the preposterous January 6th committee to investigate the worst thing that ever happened in

00:35:23.960 American history. And the Republicans said, okay, we're going to send some Republicans to this

00:35:28.340 committee then. We're going to name Jim Jordan. I forget who the other Republican congressman who

00:35:32.340 was going to go to that committee were. The House said, nope. Pelosi said, no, you're not going to do

00:35:39.860 that. We're not going to let you have any actual Republicans. We're going to name the Republicans.

00:35:42.800 It's going to be, it's going to be Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who aren't real Republicans.

00:35:47.760 Who are, for all intents and purposes, Democrats. Oh, but now this is the great upsetting of, oh no,

00:35:53.820 this is terrible. Okay. Well, I guess Hakeem Jeffries just made a slight progressive out of

00:35:57.940 me because I think that's one historical tradition that that's gone. And even if it was a good

00:36:02.960 tradition, the Democrats are the ones who blew it up. And now I don't want to hear them whining

00:36:06.540 about the chickens coming home to roost. This month, we are celebrating the anniversary of one of

00:36:11.740 the greatest moments in Daily Wire history. After months of us leading the legal battle against

00:36:16.580 the federal government and a national do not comply campaign, the Supreme Court ruled in our favor

00:36:21.580 and blocked the Biden administration's outrageous vaccine mandate. This mandate would have set a

00:36:26.820 dangerous precedent, giving the unelected OSHA power over the personal medical decisions of Americans.

00:36:32.580 The Supreme Court recognized this gross power grab and made the right decision. We are so proud to have

00:36:37.980 led the charge in this fight. Could not have done that without you. Thousands of you joined the Daily Wire

00:36:43.260 and over a million Americans signed our petition against the mandates. To celebrate, we're offering 40%

00:36:49.080 off our annual memberships with the code DO NOTCOMPLY. So celebrate one of the greatest moments in Daily Wire

00:36:54.360 history with 40% off your annual membership. Dailywire.com slash subscribe. Join the winning team as we continue

00:37:00.380 to crush the libs. Do not comply is the code. Do not comply for 40% off. Speaking of committees,

00:37:09.580 Republican Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene is set to get new committee positions. This is a big

00:37:16.020 comeback for MTG because she had previously been kicked off of the committees. Now the GOP House Steering

00:37:25.540 Committee voted to give Marjorie a seat on the House Homeland Security Committee. This is a minor

00:37:31.440 personnel issue, so I don't want to spend too much time on it. But it's an important one because it

00:37:38.200 shows you how politics works. The nitty gritty nuts and bolts of politics. The reason that Marjorie

00:37:44.600 made a comeback is because she backed Kevin McCarthy. And she backed Kevin McCarthy in that House fight

00:37:51.500 over her fellow conservatives in the Freedom Caucus who were opposing McCarthy. And it was a real tough

00:37:59.960 fight here. And a lot of people wondered, they said, why is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is one of the

00:38:04.640 more conservative members of the House, certainly one of the more outspoken conservatives, why is she

00:38:09.480 backing a guy who's being called establishment? This is why. Because it was the only way that she could

00:38:18.340 get any even marginal power back in the House of Representatives. And some people have attacked

00:38:25.500 her for it and said, well, that's unprincipled. But I don't know that it's totally unprincipled.

00:38:30.500 Kevin McCarthy was likely going to win anyway. She realized this was her only path back. Now she's

00:38:37.200 on a committee. I'm almost certain Kevin McCarthy said the only way that you were getting on a committee

00:38:43.120 ever again is by backing me and whipping some votes for me. And it brings me back to a principle

00:38:48.000 that old cocaine Mitch McConnell, love him or hate him. He made a very good point.

00:38:53.540 He said, the way politics works is the winners go and make laws and the losers go home.

00:39:05.040 Say hello to my little friend. That's what he said. He said, at least the first part is what he said.

00:39:09.440 And that's true. That's how politics works. Now Marjorie Greene, she's got a little bit of power

00:39:14.680 back. Hope she uses it. Well, I trust that she will use it. Well, speaking of inclusion,

00:39:19.100 Facebook has decided to lift a ban that it had had for some years now on the Azov regiment.

00:39:28.720 The Azov regiment is a military regiment in Ukraine that has a bunch of Nazis in it.

00:39:39.180 And when I say it has a bunch of Nazis in it, I'm using that term in at least a slightly more precise

00:39:46.780 way than the Libs do when they call all of us Nazis. It's a battalion that uses Nazi symbols

00:39:54.960 and signs and wears Nazi symbols on their uniforms. And so because of this, they had been kicked off

00:40:01.820 of Facebook. In fact, the Azov regiment is one of the justifications that Putin made in his initial

00:40:08.880 speech outlining the reason for the war in Ukraine. He said, we're going to go in and de-Nazify

00:40:14.420 Ukraine. And in the Western press, they reported this and said, this is a completely baseless charge.

00:40:19.320 No, there is a basis for this charge. The basis is the Azov regiment, which does use Nazi-like

00:40:25.620 symbols and signs. And Facebook had kicked the Azov regiment off because of this Nazi association.

00:40:32.620 But now they've lifted that ban because Facebook supports Ukraine against Russia. And so all of a

00:40:38.640 sudden, the Nazis aren't so Nazi anymore and they get to go onto Facebook. All of which I mentioned

00:40:44.300 not to say anything about the war in Ukraine, not to say anything about Russia or Zelensky or the

00:40:51.600 American side, because we are essentially fighting this war with Russia and we're just using Ukraine

00:40:56.400 as a proxy. I mention it because it shows you that political alliances are circumstantial,

00:41:03.480 not eternal. Let's not forget in the Second World War, we teamed up with the communists. We teamed up

00:41:14.080 with Stalin, one of the worst communists ever, a truly evil, evil empire. And we created an alliance

00:41:22.820 with them to defeat Hitler and Nazi Germany. And then immediately after the war, then we fight a

00:41:30.040 decades-long war with the Soviet Union and the Cold War. I mention this to show that even the

00:41:36.400 meaning of a word like Nazi is constantly in flux. Three days ago, the Azov regiment was a bunch of

00:41:43.500 Nazis. Today, oh, they're not Nazis at all. That's propaganda. You're a Putin apologist if you say that.

00:41:49.840 Well, but hold on. Five days ago, you were the ones telling me that they were Nazis. Yeah, no,

00:41:52.980 forget that. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. These are not the droids you're looking

00:41:56.280 for. They're not Nazis. You're a Nazi. No, you're a Nazi. No, you're a Nazi. The word Nazi is in flux

00:42:02.660 because there are no Nazis anymore. The Nazis are over. Nazis refer to a specific political movement

00:42:13.080 in a specific place at a specific time in the 20th century in Europe. It doesn't, if you, even at the

00:42:22.680 same time, if you were to call Italians Nazis, followers of Mussolini Nazis, that is not true.

00:42:27.680 They were not Nazis. They were fascists, but they weren't Nazis. You call the followers of Francisco

00:42:33.600 Franco Nazis. That's not true. They were not Nazis. They were right-wing. They were authoritarian,

00:42:38.600 but they were not Nazis. That refers to a specific thing. And the fact that the Nazis are gone and there

00:42:43.680 are no Nazis anymore and there cannot be Nazis anymore is the reason that this word can be in flux.

00:42:48.440 Because now that it has a specific referent is gone, it can mean anything at all. And it will

00:42:56.140 mean all manner of things. Yes, they call you a Nazi today. They call Ben a Nazi. They call Shapiro,

00:43:04.960 a man who wears a yarmulke every day of his life, they call him a Nazi. They call all sorts of people

00:43:09.820 Nazis because it is just a word that is in flux. The Azov Regiment used to be Nazis. Today,

00:43:15.180 they're not Nazis. They will be Nazis again at some point. Mark my words. Speaking of warfare,

00:43:21.640 the Libs are trying to ban our guns. They specifically are trying to ban AR-15s. You're

00:43:25.680 seeing a big move among the House Democrats to ban the AR-15, one of the most popular guns in the

00:43:29.540 country. And their arguments are not totally persuasive. Nina Turner, who is some lady from

00:43:35.600 the Young Turks, she typified a left-wing argument against the AR-15. She said,

00:43:41.160 if you need an AR-15 to hunt, you're probably not a great hunter.

00:43:48.360 I promise you this is a woman who has never handled an AR-15. She's probably never seen an

00:43:52.140 AR-15 in person. She has no idea how the gun works, what kind of caliber round it takes. She

00:43:57.120 doesn't know anything about it, as is true of almost all of the Libs, including the Libs who

00:44:01.200 writing the laws on guns. For starters, you can hunt with an AR-15, but an AR-15 would not be a

00:44:11.480 wise choice for lots of hunting. If you're hunting small deer or you're hunting rabbits, AR-15, fine

00:44:17.080 choice. If you're hunting a bear, if you're hunting a lion, hunting an elephant, I would not recommend

00:44:21.880 the AR-15. I don't think that is going to end very well for you. But this argument is not really

00:44:29.760 even an argument. It's a moving of the goalposts in the way that the Libs always move the goalposts.

00:44:36.540 Nina Turner and the Libs are not making this argument. The AR-15 is the worst, most lethal,

00:44:43.740 most powerful gun ever made. It's not. It's obviously not. That's why, sure, you can hunt

00:44:47.300 some deer with the AR-15, but you would want a much more powerful weapon to hunt something like

00:44:51.540 a bear or a bigger animal. So they're not making that argument. They can't make the argument that

00:44:56.580 the AR-15 is totally, completely different from any other bolt-action .223 rifle, or even a

00:45:04.900 semi-automatic rifle that is not an AR-15. They can't make these distinctions. So what do they

00:45:10.600 say? It's this kind of snide remark. Oh, you know, you're probably just not a good hunter. They did this

00:45:17.040 with torture. Do you remember, during the debates on torture and enhanced interrogation during the Bush

00:45:21.680 years? The Libs said, torture is terrible. It's cruel and unusual punishment. The argument against

00:45:29.540 that would be, well, no, it's not all that unusual, and it's not punishment. Torture here in the

00:45:38.020 American experience of the war in Iraq was to get information out of people. Antonin Scalia made this

00:45:44.900 point. He said, when you're torturing someone to get information out of them, you're not punishing that

00:45:48.160 person. It probably doesn't feel that great, but you're not actually punishing them. They say,

00:45:55.500 well, but torture, it's torturing foreign combatants. It's against the law by the Geneva

00:46:01.780 Conventions. No, and not really, not when you're talking about terrorists. The whole point of the

00:46:05.220 Geneva Convention protections is to protect civilians in times of war. So if you extend Geneva

00:46:11.800 Convention protections to terrorists who specifically target civilians, you undermine the entire Geneva

00:46:16.240 Convention. Okay, well, no, but the, well, you know what I say? I say torture just doesn't work.

00:46:21.580 It doesn't, it's evil and terrible, and it doesn't even work. Well, hold on. That's a, that's just a

00:46:26.800 separate point. So which is it? Is the problem that it doesn't work, or is the problem that it's evil

00:46:32.120 and cruel and unusual punishment? They don't have an answer to it, so they're just trying to throw

00:46:35.520 spaghetti at the wall. Speaking of the wall, you remember during the controversy over the wall during

00:46:39.440 Trump. They said, my problem with the Trump wall is that it's evil and it's inhumane, and it doesn't

00:46:45.260 work. Well, if it's evil and inhumane, presumably that is because it works, because it's evil and

00:46:53.220 inhumane to keep the illegal aliens out, or it's evil and inhumane to make them try to crawl up a

00:46:57.880 wall, and that's very dangerous, or it doesn't work. But if it doesn't work, it's not evil and

00:47:02.880 inhumane, because it doesn't do anything. You just get right across it. That's what they're doing on the

00:47:06.580 guns. It shows you how little argument they have. They might still ban them anyway.

00:47:11.540 They're going to do their best to ban them anyway, but they're not going to ban them by

00:47:15.180 persuading you. They're going to ban them in the same way they're going to get you to eat the bugs.

00:47:17.980 They're just going to do it outside of the realm of public debate. They're just going to do it because

00:47:22.380 they have the power and they're willing to wield it. You know what today is? Today is Woke Wednesday.

00:47:27.180 The rest of the show continues now. There is a very thought-provoking, woke reaction

00:47:33.780 that Mr. Davies and the other producers want me to process and give my expert analysis on.

00:47:41.440 You only get that on the member segment. So to become a member today, use code Knowles at checkout,

00:47:46.580 K-N-A-W-L-E-S. That's dailywire.com slash Knowles. Use code Knowles. You will get two months free on all

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00:48:16.040 questions.

Ep. 1169 - They Put Bugs In The Food

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