Ep. 1173 - Democrats Team Up With Republicans To Spend All Your Money
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Summary
In this episode of the show, I talk about the latest in the ongoing debate over entitlement reform, and how we can prepare for a natural disaster like a pandemic or a terrorist attack. I also talk about how the U.S. can continue to be the world s most powerful empire, even in the face of massive debts and mounting deficits.
Transcript
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has just announced that in the upcoming spending fight,
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any and all spending cuts to Social Security and Medicare are, quote, completely off the table.
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Now, this promise poses a problem. Since 46% of federal spending comes from Social Security
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Medicare and related programs, which means that if no one wants to touch those entitlements,
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the federal government would have to reduce 85% of all other spending, military, education, energy,
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servicing the debt, all of it in order to deal with the deficit, which is to say it becomes impossible.
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Republicans used to pull their hair out over this issue of entitlement reform some 20 years ago,
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back when the debt to GDP ratio was less than 60%. We came pretty close to actually reforming
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entitlements a dozen or so years ago when debt to GDP was about 90%. But now we've got a debt that is
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123% of GDP. In other words, we are just not going to pay it back or ever meaningfully pay it down,
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especially since we accumulated all that debt back when interest rates were around zero before they
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shot up in recent months, making debt much more expensive to service and pay off. But it doesn't
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really matter because the U.S. is the top dog around the world. So as long as we remain dominant and our
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dollar remains trustworthy, the U.S. can keep on spending money we don't have with pretty much
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no consequences. We are in a new phase of our nation's history, and everybody knows it, and
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nobody is even pretending otherwise anymore. Not even the Republicans, not even the conservatives.
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We no longer need to worry as much about how to pay off tens of trillions of dollars of debt,
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but we've only traded that problem for a tougher one. How do we remain the world's most powerful
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empire forever? I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday is from Walter Sobchak, who says,
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I have to click two agreements to watch some wonder Mike spit some sick truths to my ears.
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Thank goodness I can just watch WAP without any warning because of its pure wholesomeness.
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This is pretty weird yesterday. A number of you called my attention to it, that there was not one,
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but actually there were two warnings that you had to click on before you could watch my episode,
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my episode on the news of the day, my episode on the officer involved killing in Memphis,
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my episode on the Paul Pelosi home invasion, my episode on, I don't know, the 2024 race.
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Apparently all that was a little too much. My episode on Pfizer, maybe that was what triggered it.
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I don't know. It's kind of weird though. You can go watch any manner of smut, porn, violent videos,
00:03:46.400
bizarre lies. You can watch that on YouTube, no problem, but you want to watch The Michael Knowles
00:03:51.220
show. I don't know where it's for, you're not allowed to do that. That's too bad. Even though
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all we're trying to do on this show is give you a little bit of, of an antidote to some of the poison
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that we see in our culture. And when you need an antidote and when you need it fast, even as supply
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chains break down, you got to check out Jace Medical. Right now, go to jacemedical.com, use promo
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code Knowles. If the past couple of years has taught you anything, it is that in a crisis like a global
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pandemic or a natural disaster, even the basics can be hard to come by. That is why you've got
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to be prepared for anything. Jace Medical is here to help. This is a brand new sponsor to the show
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that I'm really, really excited about. Jace Medical helps you get a long-term supply of prescription
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jump on a quick call with one of their board certified physicians from there. You can ask
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your physician treatment related questions on an ongoing basis. I'm going to put this really simply
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for you. If China invades Taiwan, the US supply chain is going to be cut off. Okay. If any number of
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crises occur in the world, you're going to be cut off. Make sure that you've got the medication that
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you need. All right. We now in the Knowles household have peace of mind because of Jace case. I want you
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to be prepared for anything. Go to jacemedical.com, enter code Knowles at checkout for a discount on
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your order. That is jacemedical.com, promo code Knowles. Good news is we don't even need to pretend
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to care about paying down our debt and dealing with our deficits anymore. Bad news is we need to remain
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the dominant empire or else it's all going to collapse. You, you only don't need to worry about
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your debt when you're the top dog. When you're not the top dog though, then, then consequences can come
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quite suddenly, very, very gradually over time. And then quite suddenly. So the question is who's
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going to run the empire? That's what a lot of people are asking right now. Donald Trump wants to
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run the empire. Joe Biden wants to run the empire. And increasingly it would appear that Ron
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DeSantis wants to run the empire. DeSantis is doing a great job in Florida. He's got a book coming out,
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one of these politician-like books that sets the stage for a presidential campaign. He's got a ton
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of support. He's surging in the polls all over the country. President Trump does not like this.
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President Trump says that Ron DeSantis is a globalist. He's specifically referring to the
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club for growth here. And, and he's attacking the club for growth and he's attacking Ron DeSantis and
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he's attacking the candidates associated with both these guys. He says the club for growth is a
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globalist group that I've been taking to the cleaners for years. We worked together for a period,
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but they couldn't get away from China, Europe, Asia, and parts unknown. They know I won't play that
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game. I am America first all the way. That's the only way we will make America great again.
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Ron DeSantis, who I made governor in both the primary and the general, is also a globalist
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and so are his donors. Jeb Low Energy Bush was next to him last week. Check past.
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So now you can tell there's a little bit of a logical issue in this attack on Ron DeSantis,
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which is, he says, Ron DeSantis, who I made governor, who I, who I got through both the
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primary and the general, is a globalist. So you say, well, if he's, if he's a good governor,
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then you can, you should take credit for him. If he's a bad governor and he's a globalist,
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you probably don't want to take credit for him, but it doesn't matter. Trump is throwing the
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kitchen sink at Ron DeSantis. And I think it's a smart move. I know that a lot of Republicans are very
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upset. Certainly people who are already signed up on the DeSantis train, they're very upset at Trump
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for this. Even a lot of Trump supporters say, why man, come on, the race isn't for, or the election
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rather, isn't for another couple of years, almost two years. Why are you going after DeSantis? He's
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one of the most popular Republicans in the country. He has to go after DeSantis because DeSantis has a
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lot of momentum on his side and he's gaining a lot of support. And so if Trump wants to beat DeSantis,
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he's got to attack DeSantis. Do I think that this is the most persuasive attack I've ever
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read in my life? No, not exactly. I don't, I don't think that this is changing a whole lot
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of minds on Ron DeSantis, but it's the opening salvo in what Trump is preparing to be a long
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primary campaign against Ron DeSantis. Now, what even some people who like Trump are saying is this
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is a bad strategy because you're attacking Ron DeSantis on an area where he is very strong and
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you are very weak. Stop going after Ron DeSantis specifically. You don't even see it too much in
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this particular attack, but you've seen it more broadly in Trump's salvos against Ron DeSantis.
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He'll say, well, DeSantis shut down Florida. DeSantis wasn't that great on COVID. DeSantis wasn't,
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he's not all the things he says that he is. And they're saying, this is really dumb. You should
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attack DeSantis where he's weak, not where he's strong. DeSantis is really strong on COVID. Trump
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is relatively weaker on COVID. Why would, this is not just craziness, okay? This is not just Trump
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shooting from the hip and following a gut impulse that's wrong. There is a good argument for this
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strategy. This is the Karl Rove strategy. So most people just intuitively believe you should attack
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your opponent where they are weak and you should, you should not, not attack your opponent in an area
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where you yourself are weak. Rove said, no, it's the opposite. Attack your opponent's strengths.
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You don't need to attack their weaknesses. Their weaknesses are manifest. Attack your opponent's
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strengths. Turn your opponent's strengths into a problem for them. This was most clearly done in
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2004 when Bush was running against John Kerry. The Iraq war was a big issue in the 2004 race.
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John Kerry was a military veteran, a decorated one, even though John Kerry's behavior after the war was
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shameful. And George Bush did not really have all that much military service. So the common sense
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said, don't attack John Kerry on the military. But that's what the Republicans did. Specifically,
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the swift boat veterans for truth attacked Kerry, said his service was a bunch of BS. He was a
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grandstander, a showboater, a ribbon collector. And it worked. The strategy did work. So you might hate
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Trump. You might love Trump. You might love DeSantis. You might hate DeSantis. I don't care.
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My thought, though, is, one, Trump's strategy makes a lot of sense. DeSantis's strategy is very
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smart, too. DeSantis is just not responding to any of this. He's going to continue to govern in
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Florida. That's exactly what he should be doing. And for the people who say, well, why do they have
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to attack each other? Because this is politics. Why does Trump have to do this? Because this is
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politics. Well, it shouldn't be like this. Well, it is like this. It is always like this. This is what
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politics is. If jockeying for power annoys you rather than amuses you, why are you paying so
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much attention to politics? Go watch baseball. I don't know. Although baseball can be very intense,
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too. I don't know. Go to an art gallery. If watching ambitious men jockey to gain power and
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attack one another in the process drives you crazy and makes your blood boil, then stop being
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involved in politics. You're not going to like it. That's all politics is. We like to think that
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those men, once they attain power, will govern in a just way for the common good and do all these
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higher-minded things. But the actual process of attaining power is this. This is it. This is all
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it is. DeSantis is doing exactly what he should be doing. Trump is also doing exactly what he should
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be doing. And we'll see how the primary process shakes out. Speaking of political jobs, a story
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came out a few days ago. We didn't have time to get to it before. Out of the RNC, the Republican
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National Committee, Ronna McDaniel was reelected. There was a race that came on between Ronna McDaniel,
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who's run the GOP for a dozen years, and Harmeet Dillon, who was a favorite of some more conservative
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people probably than support Ronna McDaniel. Though it broke down, it was a little bit confusing,
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because Trump backed McDaniel, DeSantis backed Harmeet Dillon. So you've got conservatives in both
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camps. You've got some squishes in both camps, too. McDaniel won. As I knew would happen, I did have
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some people come up to me behind the scenes, ask me what I thought. I don't think I even maybe talked
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about this on the air, so I don't know that I get full Nolstradamus credit for this prediction.
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But I did predict it. And people said, ah, Michael, we've got to back Harmeet. We're going to throw all
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of our support behind Harmeet. I said, well, you're free to do that. I like Harmeet Dillon very much.
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I said, but if you wanted me to place a bet right now, my bet is Ronna McDaniel holds on.
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These people looked at me shocked. They said, oh, what? What are you talking about? All the support is for
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Harmeet Dillon. I said, no, people on Twitter like Harmeet Dillon. And I'm sure many people at the RNC
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privately like Harmeet Dillon, too. But Ronna McDaniel will hold on to power. If you are surprised
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by the re-election of Ronna McDaniel, 111 votes to Harmeet's 53, and then Mike Lindell got four votes,
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if you're surprised by that, you haven't been paying terribly close attention to the Republican Party.
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The way that the party committees work, the way that elections work broadly,
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does not correspond often, if ever at all, to what people in certain political bubbles are
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talking about on Twitter. That's not how it works. Some people are very, very upset about this. They
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say, no, we can't. That's terrible. Ronna didn't do a good job. Now she's still running things. This
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is terrible. I don't really care who runs the RNC. I like Ronna. I like Harmeet. I like Mike Lindell,
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for that matter. I don't really care all that much. It's not a great job to have. It involves
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a lot of really granular kinds of decisions. And most importantly of all, any significant
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improvement to the Republican Party or to US politics is going to come from outside of the
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party committee. I'm not looking to the RNC to solve our political problems. That's not what
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the committee was built for. That's not what the committee does. I don't think that's what the
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committee can do. Donald Trump didn't win in 2016 by convincing the RNC to support him.
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Donald Trump engaged in a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And then the RNC sort of got on
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board. So, okay, whoever runs the committee, fine, whatever. The real significant improvement,
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it ain't coming from some party committee in Washington, D.C. Speaking of employment,
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a Google executive was fired for not being inclusive enough. Because this Google executive,
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you see, he engaged in a terrible crime. He favored good employees over underperforming
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employees. His Google exec was fairly high ranking. He was allegedly sexually harassed by his boss
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and then fired for failing to be inclusive, according to a lawsuit filed in New York federal court.
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He fired Ryan Olihan as managing director of food, beverage, and restaurants,
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telling him it was because he was not inclusive enough. What did he do? Google's employee
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investigations team explained that this guy had shown favoritism toward high performers,
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which it considered non-inclusive, and commented on employees' walking pace and hustle,
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which it considered ableist. If you've ever worked in a restaurant, I've worked in restaurants,
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you know, it's a kind of intense environment, especially if you're working in the kitchen.
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But waiters, too. You've got to move. You've got to move fast. So if you say, hey,
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move quickly. Let's go. Put a little hop in your step. That's very ableist.
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And the real issue was, apparently, this guy didn't discriminate against white people enough.
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In February of 2022, Adam Stewart, who's VP of Google's Consumer Government and Entertainment
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Division, told Olihan that there were, quote, obviously too many white guys in the division.
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And then in July, Stewart and the company's HR department, quote, encouraged Olihan to terminate
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the employment of a male member of his team and replace him with a female hire because it wasn't
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inclusive enough. Unless you fire the white guys and unless you discriminate against white people
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and against men, you're not being inclusive enough. And why? Why is this? Olihan says he's just
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picking the best people for the job. He doesn't care about race. He doesn't care about sex. He's
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just hiring the best people for the job. And he's favoring high performers and promoting them.
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Google says, yeah, maybe you are, but that's a problem.
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If the argument is that non-whites cannot compete on merit, then the only solution
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is conscious active discrimination against whites. If the argument is that women can't compete with men
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on the merit in these jobs, then the only solution is active discrimination against men.
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That is the only solution. You see this in major lawsuits right now that will determine the fate of
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affirmative action, quote, unquote, in college. What's affirmative action in college? It's saying
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that students of certain racial backgrounds cannot compete against students of other racial backgrounds
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on the merit. And so you've got to actively discriminate against the students of the more
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successful racial backgrounds. And what does this mean in practice? You know, the lawsuit never would
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have gone anywhere if this were simply about discriminating against white people. You're not
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allowed to complain about that. You're not allowed to object to that at all in our culture. The reason
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that it's gone anywhere with the universities is because Asians got lumped in with the white people
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too. That was one of the real flaws of the affirmative action regime. If they had just
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limited it to white people, it wouldn't matter. It is legal and culturally accepted and frankly,
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culturally encouraged to attack white people and slander white people and discriminate against
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them in our culture. The mistake they made was lumping in Asians. And so the lawsuits in this regard
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have said, wait a second, why are you discriminating against Asians in many cases who come from difficult
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backgrounds, immigrants, don't have a lot of money, didn't have a lot of opportunities. Why are you
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docking their points on the SAT or why are you docking their points in the overall metric to admit
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students to college and then giving an artificial boost to black and Hispanic students? Why are you,
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why on earth would you do that? And no one can really give an answer, but that's, but it has to be that
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way. This is the logic of it. Either people are going to compete on the merit or you are going to
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actively discriminate against people. And it's interesting that this lawsuit is coming up right
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now as the Supreme Court. We are waiting for them to strike down affirmative action or to uphold
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affirmative action. That is going to have a lot to say, not just about this case of a Google executive
00:19:20.000
who was not inclusive enough because he was not exclusive enough. He was not inclusive enough
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because he didn't fire enough white guys. It's not only going to have something to say about the fate of
00:19:30.380
that case. It's going to have something to say about the future of the country. Do we have a
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caste system or not? Do we have favored groups or not? And therefore disfavored groups or not?
00:19:42.380
Speaking of the job market, Maryland lawmakers are proposing increasing the weekend by 50%.
00:19:50.120
That's right. They're proposing a four day work week. This legislation would provide state tax credits
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as high as three quarters of a million dollars per year for businesses that reduce at least 30
00:20:01.740
employees from a 40 hour work week to a 32 hour work week without a reduction in pay or benefits.
00:20:09.640
Now, of course, the businesses might be able to do this in the short term because they're just
00:20:13.600
getting the pay and benefits from the government and then they can just pass that along.
00:20:17.940
Why do people want a four day work week? Well, one, because we all want to just sit on the couch
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an extra day. That sounds very pleasant. Or even spend more time with our families or catch up on
00:20:27.340
reading or fix up the house. But the argument from the business side is that the four day work
00:20:32.860
week framework gives employees a better work life balance and actually makes them more productive.
00:20:40.100
Some 45% of workers cite lackluster flexibility when discussing why they left previous jobs.
00:20:45.340
Roughly 48% mentioned child care difficulties, according to a survey from Pew Research. And this
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international study concluded that revenues increased 8% for companies involved with the
00:20:57.760
experiment. So they reduced the work week by one day. Revenue increases by 8%. Now, this is just one
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study. Perhaps there will be others to back this up. But I can totally empathize, not only sympathize,
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but empathize with the workers who say, look, I don't have enough flexibility. I'm not seeing my
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kids enough. This is really tough, especially now that we have an economy where both parents are
00:21:19.820
expected to work. It's very, very difficult in this economy to raise a family on a single income.
00:21:25.760
So daddy's got to go work. Mommy's got to go work. And then who's taking care of the kids?
00:21:30.180
Then you've got to try to arrange, do I get it? Maybe I can get an extra half day off here every
00:21:34.020
so often. But really what you've got to do is just take all the money we're making at the widget
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factory and go pay some other woman to raise our kids. We don't really want to do that. Can we go on
00:21:41.100
vacation? Do we have any flexibility at all? So the Maryland lawmakers are proposing this
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radical idea of the four-day workweek. I have a more radical idea. I know you're going to hear
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the arch-capitalist libertarian type people who say, no, we shouldn't reduce the workweek at all.
00:22:00.400
We should work seven days a week and we should let the market sort it all out. No, I'm not arguing
00:22:04.120
that. I'm all for reducing the workweek for some people. What if, follow me here, we reduce
00:22:12.220
the workweek of mothers dramatically. What if we reduce it down to like nothing, down to from five
00:22:21.140
days, not just to four days, maybe to like zero to one days. And then we balance that. I know we're
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going to need balance in the economy. We balance that out by having the fathers and the husbands
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work even harder. So you've got a situation where you've got the moms can stay home and raise the kids
00:22:38.560
and you reduce the number of people in the labor force because now you're removing up to half of
00:22:45.300
the labor force. And so therefore the wages are going to increase for the other half that remains
00:22:50.180
in the labor force. And in so doing, you're much more likely to have a country in which a family can
00:22:58.200
support itself on a single income. And then the children get to see mommy and they don't just need
00:23:04.660
mommy to go work for some Mr. McGillicuddy at the widget factory so that mommy can put her money
00:23:09.160
into a bank account and then daddy can pay some other woman to raise the kids. What if then,
00:23:13.020
what if you actually had in that case a complementarity between the roles in the family
00:23:17.780
and you had the children spending time with their mothers and the father going out and bringing home
00:23:21.620
the bacon? Wouldn't that be so radical and weird? That's such a crazy idea. I wonder, maybe I'll call
00:23:26.680
up the Maryland lawmakers because they're onto something here. All these people doing all these
00:23:32.360
studies and the lab coats and they're onto something here. But maybe our answer is, maybe we've got more
00:23:40.200
evidence for this than even for the four-day work week because this is the way the world worked
00:23:44.480
until very, very recently. Really until the World War. So the Second World War when the men were all
00:23:51.260
overseas, women started to enter into the labor force. And then companies really enjoyed women entering
00:23:56.660
the labor force because contrary to the gender pay gap or whatever nonsense you hear about that,
00:24:00.260
the companies love to hire women because the more people you have in the labor force, the more it
00:24:04.620
drives down the cost of labor. And this has been a big boon to GDP. This has been a big boon to
00:24:09.600
corporations. This has been disastrous though for the American family, which is why workers are
00:24:14.540
complaining about all these problems right now. But you can fix these problems. You don't need to
00:24:17.740
reinvent the wheel. You can go back to a more traditional way of living. Speaking of men and women,
00:24:23.620
Dylan Mulvaney. I covered Dylan Mulvaney, not on this show exactly, but I did a long video that
00:24:31.840
ended up going pretty viral on YouTube about who Dylan Mulvaney is, how this obscure Broadway performer
00:24:39.460
ended up pretending to become a woman and then sitting down interviewing the president of the United
00:24:44.380
States in a very short period of time. And I gave my take on Mulvaney that he's not just a troll.
00:24:51.020
He's not just making fun of transgenderism, even though he's prancing around and performing this
00:24:58.860
ridiculous caricature of a woman saying, you know, it's my first day as a woman. I've cried three
00:25:04.280
times today. Oh, which is frankly somewhat accurate. Part of his performance is quite a caricature,
00:25:10.160
but women do cry a lot. Okay. And it's just in my experience, I've known many women in my life,
00:25:15.000
but a lot of his performance is an over-the-top caricature. And so some people thought,
00:25:20.120
oh, he's just a troll. He's just making fun of the whole thing. No, I don't. My argument was that
00:25:24.920
this is an actor who's been trained in the modern style of acting, who is indulging the worst
00:25:31.520
and most dangerous impulses of that style of acting, which actually goes back even before
00:25:37.060
the group theater, even before the Strasburg Method, it goes back to the Russian Moscow art
00:25:41.200
theater director Stanislavski, and it goes back to Freud. And so it has ripple effects in our culture
00:25:46.840
far beyond the theater. And it would seem that I am right because Dylan Mulvaney has undergone a
00:25:52.500
facial feminization surgery to carve up his face to make him look marginally more like a woman.
00:25:59.420
So Dylan Mulvaney comes out in this bizarre kind of ballet costume,
00:26:11.960
not looking much more like a woman. His face looks a bit like Caitlyn Jenner,
00:26:19.460
because I assume, sorry, Bruce Jenner, after he revealed himself as Caitlyn,
00:26:22.800
because I assume they all follow the same guidelines, but he doesn't, he doesn't look like him.
00:26:35.460
That's a wrap on face reveal. Oh my gosh. Hi, I missed you. You know,
00:26:40.840
I have a flair for the dramatics, but it's so good, right? I'm so happy. And it's still me.
00:26:46.640
It's just a little bit softer of aversion. And I just hope that all trans and non-binary people can
00:26:52.960
get the gender affirming resources that they need, because this is life changing and sometimes
00:26:58.760
life saving. So thank you so much for supporting me. And we've got so much to catch up on. I love you.
00:27:07.780
This was Dylan Mulvaney's face reveal. In a sane and healthy culture, Dylan Mulvaney's
00:27:14.040
reveal would have been him in a straight jacket in a padded cell receiving the psychological help
00:27:19.920
that he needs. The reveal would be that this guy is going to go away for a little while. He's going
00:27:26.440
to get some help. Then maybe he'll come back when he realizes he's not a woman. But our society is no
00:27:31.160
longer sane or healthy really in any way. So the society now celebrates this delusion. Whatever it is,
00:27:39.840
he's not faking it. People don't get the bones in their face chopped up because they're faking it.
00:27:46.220
People don't get other things chopped off. I don't know if he's done that yet or not. Don't really
00:27:49.780
want to know either. They don't do that because they're faking it. This is a real delusion. And it's,
00:27:58.720
just some people following some deviant desires. This is exploding as a phenomenon. It is a social
00:28:06.800
contagion. It might be because they're turning the fricking frogs gay with chemicals in the water.
00:28:11.200
More likely though, I think it's, it's a social phenomenon. And it's because all the rest of us
00:28:15.520
are indulging it with a straight face. If, if we as a society just said, nope, this is nuts. You have
00:28:20.700
no right to do any of this. You have no right to call yourself a woman. You, if you do, if you refer
00:28:25.700
to yourself as she and her, we are going to ostracize you for that. And we're going to, or there will be
00:28:32.540
consequences in your professional and educational life. And we're just not going to tolerate that at
00:28:37.240
all. If we, if we were a little less live and let live, man, then Dylan Mulvaney would live a much
00:28:42.860
better life. Because the consequences of our live and let live, who knows, man, maybe your good is my
00:28:48.900
bad. Maybe your yuck is my yum. Maybe your man is my woman. You know what I'm saying, man? Are, are
00:28:53.660
the consequences of that radical skepticism are now that this man is chopping up his face and engaging
00:29:02.300
even more destructive behavior that is not going to end well. Speaking of transgenderism, major, big
00:29:10.680
first, really, really big first. The first openly transgender figure skater has just appeared at the
00:29:21.080
European figure skating championships in Espoo, Finland. This is Minna Maria Antikainen, a Finnish skater
00:29:31.280
who's an older man, dressed up as a woman, skating around, not, not the most gracefully, but he's sort
00:29:41.880
of skating and lit and then he falls down. And then he falls on the ice and he can't stand up.
00:29:51.080
And so then the Finnish people with the flag come out and try to help him stand up. And then,
00:29:59.980
and the craziest part of this whole display is that we're not allowed to acknowledge it. I mean,
00:30:08.220
on this show we do, but in the culture, you're not, if you, if you're sitting there in that audience,
00:30:14.760
I, you can't hear it on any of the clips that I've seen and I'm sure you couldn't hear it in the,
00:30:19.920
in the audience. You're not allowed to say, oh, this is weird. This is funny. This is obviously
00:30:25.400
absurd. No, we all have to just sit there and pretend, oh yes, she's so beautiful. These poor
00:30:31.320
little girls who were on the track teams with all the confused men or on the Penn swimming team with
00:30:36.140
that hulk of a man who took all their trophies. And then what do the girls have to do? On camera,
00:30:42.060
they have to smile. They have to plaster a smile. They say, this is really great. She is so beautiful.
00:30:47.340
We love being on her team. And then privately, of course, when they're speaking to journalists and
00:30:53.440
they can remain anonymous, they say, this is terrible. We don't want some guy getting naked
00:30:56.200
in our locker room and taking our trophies and taking our scholarships. And this is deeply unjust.
00:31:00.100
But then when the cameras come out, they say, ah, well, this is, you are beautiful. Caitlin and
00:31:06.380
Dylan, though, I don't know what Dylan's new lady name is going to be. I guess Dylan's kind of
00:31:10.260
androgynous. You are beautiful. Mina Maria finished. You're the greatest skater I've ever seen.
00:31:16.040
You're a regular Tonya Harding. In totalitarian countries, one of the things that we marvel at
00:31:26.980
is that the people are forced to perform lies all the time. When Kim Jong-il died and you had major
00:31:35.500
parades all throughout North Korea to honor the death of the great leader,
00:31:40.120
you saw all those cameras in all these North Koreans. Perhaps some were moved seriously by
00:31:47.000
sympathy. I kind of doubt a lot of it, though. For many of them, they were performing it because
00:31:50.340
there were guns pointed at them. And they knew that if they didn't cry enough over the death of
00:31:55.060
dear leader, they could be tortured. They could be killed. Their family could be killed.
00:32:01.440
Everybody has to lie. This is true in Stalin's Russia, in the Soviet Union. This is true in China.
00:32:09.640
And this is now true in the West. We are forced to lie too because our government is increasingly
00:32:17.760
totalitarian. It's a total state. It comprises everything. If you in your HR meeting don't
00:32:27.880
affirm that some hulking, hairy dude wearing a dress in stilettos and with lipstick smeared on
00:32:33.680
his face is actually a beautiful woman, you could be fired. And you probably will be fired.
00:32:38.980
And once you're fired for that, you're going to have a hard time getting more employment.
00:32:43.020
And you're going to be a pariah in your society. We say, terrible when North Korea does that.
00:32:48.180
Terrible. And so the good thing we live in America, the land of the free and the home of
00:32:53.160
totalitarian delusion every day, more and more so. But love is love, right? Love is love. You do you.
00:33:02.860
Trans women are women. Everybody's whatever they want to be. If love is love, then I got a question
00:33:09.440
about a story that just came out. A story out of ABC News. A couple of hosts for Good Morning America
00:33:15.980
3 were just fired because they had an affair. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes. I've never watched this show.
00:33:23.900
I didn't know there was such a thing as Good Morning America 3. But they were hosts of it and they just
00:33:29.400
got fired because they were both married and then they had a consensual affair and then this came to
00:33:35.320
light. And it's not as though one person accused the other of sexual harassment or anything like that.
00:33:39.220
They were both married, but they had a consensual affair and now they're canned.
00:33:47.320
Why is that wrong? I know why it's wrong. Because marriage is an indissoluble bond between a husband
00:33:56.720
and a wife for the good of the spouses and the sake of the generation and education of children.
00:34:01.660
I know that it's wrong because spouses take a vow before God and before the political community
00:34:06.440
to remain with one another through thick and thin, good times and bad, sickness and health.
00:34:13.940
And that's wrong to break. But that's not what the modern culture believes. The modern culture
00:34:19.180
believes that marriage is nothing but a kind of meaningless sheet of paper and we can leave our
00:34:24.580
spouses for whatever reason we want and that's called a no-fault divorce. And there's nothing wrong
00:34:29.820
with polyamory, polygamy, whatever. There's nothing wrong with any of these arrangements.
00:34:34.060
Love is love. Love is love. That's the whole argument for redefining marriage is that the
00:34:42.080
affection between two men and the affection between two women is the same as marriage,
00:34:48.660
the affection and then institution that that desire leads toward in the institution of marriage.
00:34:57.860
That's all the same. Okay, well if love is love, if all shades of love and affection are exactly the
00:35:03.600
same, why don't they get to have their, there was consensual. Yeah, it wasn't so nice to their
00:35:09.160
spouses, but so what? We don't, we don't really give much credence to marriage vows anymore.
00:35:16.180
Why is this wrong? Because if, if we know that this is wrong, then what we're really saying is
00:35:22.340
that TJ Holmes and Amy Robach should have repressed their romantic desire for each other. They should
00:35:28.360
have denied the love that they felt for one another. They should have pushed it way, way deep down
00:35:33.500
because they had other obligations, because the moral order demanded more of them than that they
00:35:39.180
follow their love for one another to its physical conclusion. But if that's the case, then,
00:35:46.920
then isn't that, then isn't that just the case? Then isn't that just how it is? And shouldn't we apply
00:35:51.840
that to all other, all sorts of other manner of love as well? No, a little bit confusing. Love is
00:35:59.100
love except for Amy, Amy Robach and TJ Holmes. They don't get to have their love, but all sorts of
00:36:05.240
other people, all sorts of weird polyamorous people with three guys and two women and a billy goat.
00:36:09.980
That's fine. That's love. That's wonderful. How dare you judge that? But Amy Robach and TJ Holmes get
00:36:15.140
fired for a consensual affair. That's really weird. It's also really weird because Amy Robach,
00:36:20.420
I actually had forgotten this until producer Danny reminded me of this today. Amy Robach,
00:36:26.240
you may have heard of her because she was caught on a hidden mic discussing how she wanted to pursue
00:36:33.980
the Jeffrey Epstein story at ABC and the producers and the executives shut her down. And she knew that
00:36:40.080
Jeffrey Epstein was a real story and she knew that this involved a lot of corruption. She wanted to
00:36:45.580
run the story and the higher ups at the network said, nope, don't talk about that.
00:36:48.720
So that adds another layer to this where I think, huh, it's so, so weird how people who transgress
00:36:55.900
the powerful liberal elites, people, people who contradict them or who get on the wrong side of
00:37:02.240
them, they end up in a sex scandal and their career goes away and then they bury them. Not all that long
00:37:08.600
after they raise these problems. Really weird. Not obviously what they did is terribly wrong and they
00:37:13.280
should repent of it and go to confession and try to make up with their spouses and try to keep their
00:37:17.060
families together. There's a lot more to this story though. It seems like there's a lot more to this
00:37:21.700
story, both as a cultural matter and even as a particular political matter with regard to Mr.
00:37:28.720
Epstein, who may or probably did not kill himself, then meets the eye. Listen up folks. We have been
00:37:35.660
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ends soon, so head to dailywire.com slash subscribe today. Today is Tuesday. Today is taking your calls
00:38:06.740
Tuesday. That is my new favorite segment because we have finally gotten technology from the 1970s at
00:38:14.860
the Daily Wire and I can take your calls right now. So let's turn to Luca in North Carolina. Luca,
00:38:25.200
you are on the air. Hi, Michael. So I'm in college and I'm taking this really great class called How to
00:38:33.280
Rule the World with this, like, One in a Million, like, Young, Genius, like, very conservative
00:38:39.220
professor. And we read Xenophon's account of Cyrus's life. And, you know, on all accounts, I think Cyrus
00:38:47.280
was a very good leader, except for some, you know, things near the end of his reign. But my question is
00:38:52.520
for you, the desire to, like, rule the world, that ambitious, like, drive that a lot of people and, like,
00:38:59.160
necessarily leaders have, do you think that that's, like, a fundamentally un-Christian desire?
00:39:04.520
No, I don't think that it's necessarily an un-Christian desire. I think it can be a perfectly
00:39:10.220
Christian desire within its just limits. I mean, as with all government, there's a good version and
00:39:16.280
a bad version. So I mentioned this on the show yesterday, Polybius's theory of anicyclosis,
00:39:21.760
the cycle of regimes, that you have three good versions of government, monarchy, aristocracy,
00:39:26.420
and democracy. And then you've got their corrupted bad versions, which is tyranny,
00:39:31.920
oligarchy, and mob rule, respectively. And what's the difference? The difference is that the good
00:39:37.360
versions of government are versions in which the rulers rule for the common good. So you can have
00:39:42.820
a monarch who rules for the common good. There have been plenty of good monarchs throughout history.
00:39:46.580
You can have an aristocracy that rules for the common good. And you can have democracies that rule
00:39:51.040
for the common good. But in the corrupted versions, the rulers, be they a single individual,
00:39:55.000
a group of people, or the people at large, are the ones who rule not for the common good,
00:39:59.880
but for their own selfish interests. So you think of this in the American context,
00:40:03.920
that warning that the republic is going to collapse when people realize that they can bribe
00:40:09.020
the people with their own money. And then demagogues rise up, and this creates a big problem.
00:40:14.860
So we need government. Government is given to us by God for our own good.
00:40:19.700
We need government to execute justice and to preserve law, order, and peace, which are good
00:40:25.580
things. And the civil authority has ultimately the sword to execute punishment, even capital
00:40:31.140
punishment, and does not bear that sword in vain. This is a fallen world. The prince of this world
00:40:36.720
is the devil. So we don't want to think that we can save ourselves and create a kind of paradise
00:40:44.180
on earth through civil government. That is not going to happen. And if that is the impulse
00:40:49.580
to take over the world, then that's not very good. But if we want to rule the world
00:40:55.000
and thereby maintain some degree of peace and justice and allow people to flourish,
00:41:02.320
then that can be a wonderful thing. I know that this is going to sound a little jarring to people
00:41:07.180
who have been raised on the kind of conservative mottos that government is always bad and no government
00:41:13.180
is best and we should never pursue politics whatsoever. All the shallow libertarian, quasi-anarchist
00:41:20.820
maxims that have become popular in the last 30 or so years. But that's not true. We shouldn't
00:41:26.240
just focus on procedure to the exclusion of substance. We shouldn't just focus on form to
00:41:31.360
the exclusion of substance. The question is not, is it good to wield political power or not wield
00:41:37.140
political power? The question is, what are you wielding the political power in service of? Really,
00:41:43.780
really good question. Let's turn to Matthew from Louisiana. Matthew, you're on the air.
00:41:51.240
Hey, Michael. I have a question about a recent post from Thomas Massey on Twitter regarding Project
00:41:58.180
Veritas. And we always kind of discuss and debate what is the public square and what should be allowed
00:42:03.780
in it. And I guess unless Project Veritas and uncovering the idea that Pfizer may potentially
00:42:11.000
be mutating viruses was somehow illegally gained, I'm curious your thoughts on using the terms of
00:42:20.080
service, if you will, on something like YouTube to potentially restrict the uploading of otherwise
00:42:26.840
legal videos when that's kind of their business is uploading videos. And just your thoughts on,
00:42:32.540
you know, how we may be able to challenge things and truly open up the public square for debate and
00:42:39.020
discussion. So I appreciate your thoughts. Really good question. I actually had my own
00:42:44.140
video yesterday censored by YouTube. So, you know, I put this show out on, it goes out on terrestrial
00:42:49.760
radio all over the country, goes out on the podcast feed, goes out on Daily Wire Plus, which is where
00:42:55.100
we have the mostly way, and really we can say whatever we want. But sometimes on YouTube in particular,
00:43:00.540
and Facebook, they will censor us, they'll put warnings up. And I had two warnings on my video
00:43:04.960
yesterday. I don't really know why I did talk about Project Veritas and Pfizer, so it might have
00:43:09.880
had something to do with that. The short answer to your question is Google and its subsidiary, YouTube,
00:43:16.320
they have no right to censor this information. They have no right as a private company, well,
00:43:21.700
if you don't like it, build your own YouTube. Nope, I don't buy that for one second. If I don't like it,
00:43:26.320
I'm going to wield my political power that I have as a citizen in a self-governing republic to stop
00:43:30.740
these people from taking important matters of public interest out of the public square.
00:43:35.640
Google controls 90% of the flow of information around the internet. If you control the public
00:43:40.500
squares, particularly in a republic, you control the whole political order. And I, as a citizen,
00:43:44.720
have something to say about that. And I want to bring the full force of the state down to stop
00:43:49.960
them from doing it. There's a further issue with Google and YouTube, which is that they are kind
00:43:56.220
of arms of the government. Yes, they're kind of private companies, but there was a lot of government
00:44:00.660
money that went into building Google. They work very, very closely with the government. And so
00:44:04.860
I don't think that they're protected as some kind of private company. I think when they violate our
00:44:08.440
free speech, in many cases, that is a violation of the First Amendment. You saw this, especially in
00:44:13.760
the Twitter files, where it came to light, thanks to Elon Musk, that the FBI and the DOJ were
00:44:18.200
pressuring Twitter to censor information. Okay, now it's no longer just Twitter as a private
00:44:22.880
corporation censoring information, and you have no recourse to First Amendment protections.
00:44:27.940
Now it's the government using Twitter as a proxy. And that's very often what happens,
00:44:32.060
and I suspect that's what's happening here with Google. I say bring the full weight of the state
00:44:37.140
down on them. Let's see. Let's turn to Kyle in North Carolina. Hello, Kyle.
00:44:48.200
Well, my question is, how do you balance completely avoiding near occasions of sin and the chance to
00:44:58.120
improve in your own virtue? Great question. Really good question. There's a good book on this topic by
00:45:04.600
Dom Lorenzo Scupoli. It's a book that's about 500 years old called The Spiritual Combat. And the answer
00:45:10.520
is that it depends on the sin and it depends on you. So your question is, I think the premise here is
00:45:19.900
that if you want to improve in virtue, then you need to be able to look your sin in the face very
00:45:24.980
often and be able to resist it. So if you want to get over your alcohol problem, it's not enough to
00:45:30.940
just throw out all the alcohol in your home. You also need to be able to be in a restaurant where
00:45:34.640
there is alcohol and not feel so tempted that you got to go grab it. Okay. That's true of most sins.
00:45:41.760
And the way to deal with that is prudently and in such a way that, okay, maybe if you're a booze
00:45:49.140
hound, you got all the booze out of your house for now and you haven't had a drink in months. And then
00:45:53.840
now you're at a party and there's a bar on the other side of the room. And you're not going to go
00:45:57.660
near the bar, but it's all the way on the other side of the room. And then maybe you can be in a place
00:46:01.880
where there's more alcohol and more people are drinking. And you can do that gradually and you've
00:46:06.120
got to test your own limits. There is one sin that this is not true of. According to Dom Lorenzo
00:46:11.160
Schuppoli in The Spiritual Combat, that would be the sin of lust. That's the one where spiritual
00:46:16.600
writers have written about this for many, many eons. You just have to run. You're not going to
00:46:22.100
confront it. Okay. Only Christ can confront the Antichrist, period. With certain sins and temptations,
00:46:28.500
we can tolerate being around them a little bit more depending on your susceptibility to them.
00:46:32.780
With lust, because sex is so central to human nature, when you are finding yourself tempted
00:46:39.280
by lust, you just have to run. You have to run in the opposite direction. So there's no world in
00:46:45.040
which you get to the point where you can, I don't know, go to a strip club or something.
00:46:49.660
Or you're going to walk around that red light district in that town you're in. Or you're going
00:46:53.120
to go to, if we're not talking about that extreme, or you go to a bar on women's night at the bar and
00:47:01.180
you're surrounded by these single women. You're not going to get to a place where you're going to
00:47:06.600
improve in virtue by resisting that. You're more likely to destroy your life. As Andrew Klavan points
00:47:13.220
out, every man is two drinks and a wink away from destroying his own life. So I would flee from that
00:47:19.240
fast as you can. Okay, we got more calls that I want to get to. And then we got important stories
00:47:23.180
that Mr. Davies says I haven't covered. We're going to do that on the member block. If you are
00:47:26.720
not a Daily Wire member, what is wrong with you? Head on over. Dailywire.com slash Knowles. Use
00:47:32.140
promo code Knowles at checkout. You get two months free on all annual plans, and I will get to chat with