The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1323 - Burning Man Traps Over 70,000 People

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00:00:26.120 31st, 2025. TD ready for you. Late last week, way out in the Nevada Black Rock desert, the high

00:00:33.820 priests of Burning Man ignited a 26 foot tall, 13 foot wide altar, which burned for 20 minutes

00:00:41.600 before collapsing to reveal a giant steel idol of a phoenix, which, according to aforementioned high

00:00:48.980 priests, supposedly had something to do with Ukraine. Then the entire place got flooded.

00:00:56.120 An unexpected and highly unusual storm appeared right over the festival, dumping three to four

00:01:04.420 months worth of rain, at least, on the desert. The total rainfall is estimated as having been

00:01:11.680 between half an inch and a full inch. Doesn't necessarily sound like a lot, but we're talking

00:01:16.680 about the desert. So to put that in perspective, just a fifth of an inch was expected for the entire

00:01:23.400 month of September. As a result, 70,000 people have been trapped in the mud for days, with attendees

00:01:31.860 being told to conserve food and water, which are apparently in short supply. Now, I don't want to

00:01:39.560 read too much into it, but as a general rule, it seems to me that one should avoid traveling to the desert

00:01:47.820 for week-long Bacchanalian orgies that culminate in the worship of giant burning idols.

00:01:54.360 It never turns out well. Whatever the Burning Man people are seeking, whether it be banal thrills like

00:02:01.960 drugs and weird sex, or the more esoteric spiritual stuff to which those sensual pleasures point,

00:02:09.860 it's not going to make them happy. They are not going to find what they are looking for.

00:02:15.120 Because eventually, the music is going to end, and the drugs are going to wear off,

00:02:21.500 and the sex is going to reach its climax, and the people who place their hope in dead idols

00:02:26.620 are going to find themselves still unsatisfied, hungry, thirsty, and covered in filth.

00:02:34.520 I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:02:45.120 Welcome back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Good Ranchers. Get great meat at a secure

00:03:00.160 price, and $30 off your order with my code Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Just had a juicy Good

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00:03:10.760 today. The libs are going to do COVID again. They're already in the process of doing COVID

00:03:17.420 again. The last COVID was begun in the year before the 2020 presidential election. Now we're the year

00:03:23.640 before the 2024 presidential election, and they are doing COVID. But it's a little different this

00:03:28.660 time, and Dr. Fauci's facing some heat. We'll get to it in a second. First, though, speaking of looking

00:03:32.860 for happiness in all the wrong places, there's a woman who's gone totally viral, and she's just a 1.00

00:03:37.760 random woman. No one's ever heard of her before. She posts a lot of content on social media, so she 1.00

00:03:43.080 clearly wants to be a public person. But until this weekend, she had been a private person. And I think

00:03:47.720 it was Walsh, actually. I think it was Matt who discovered this woman's TikTok and made her go 0.59

00:03:52.620 viral. She's gone viral for explaining how happy she is not to be married and not to have children 0.95

00:04:00.760 because she gets to sleep in late and drink too much and go to concerts and things like that. And 1.00

00:04:05.660 she's gone viral because while her words say that she's very happy, her eyes and her demeanor and the

00:04:11.880 tone of her voice tell a different story.

00:04:14.340 It's 10.45 a.m. on a Saturday. I'm 29 and single, and I don't have kids yet. Here's what your Saturday

00:04:20.140 morning looks like when you're single at 29 and you don't have a kid running around the house. I didn't

00:04:25.900 rise from my bed until 10.15. Every time I thought, I should probably get up and do something. I thought,

00:04:30.840 why? Nobody's making me. I'm not missing out on anything. I went to Beyonce last night and I didn't

00:04:35.840 get home until 1 a.m. And I danced and drank my little heart out and I didn't pay a babysitter

00:04:40.100 to watch my kids as I did that. And I woke up a tad hungover this morning, which is probably why I

00:04:44.440 was in bed for so long. And I was just scrolling on my phone and I saw a picture of Shakshuka and I

00:04:48.840 thought, you know what sounds really good? Maybe I'm going to learn how to make Shakshuka today.

00:04:53.100 This woman had my total sympathy. A lot of conservatives watched this and reacted with

00:05:00.920 scorn and derision. She had my total sympathy until she mentioned Shakshuka, which is disgusting.

00:05:07.520 Shakshuka is this breakfast dish where you poach eggs in a spaghetti sauce and it's just gross. And

00:05:15.220 poached eggs are fine. I like poached eggs. And spaghetti sauce I like very much, of course, and all sorts of

00:05:20.800 different dishes. But you put those two things together, it's gross. I like veal salt and bokeh.

00:05:26.020 I like green jolly ranchers. I don't want to put them together. So anyway, that's where she really

00:05:29.620 started to lose me and her monologue went downhill from there.

00:05:34.480 Because I have no plans and I don't have kids and I don't have a husband and I don't have errands to

00:05:39.140 run. I can go to the grocery store and learn how to make Shakshuka. So that's on my agenda today.

00:05:43.820 Also on my agenda, probably a rewatch of some Real Housewives of New York. I'm also doing a rewatch of

00:05:48.400 normal people on Hulu, which is really spicy and I highly recommend. Weirdly, I'm into this

00:05:52.640 documentary on Netflix about blue zone countries. So I've got a pretty stacked day. Anyway, I say all

00:05:58.140 this to say, whenever I'm hard on myself about why I'm not married and I don't have kids and I should

00:06:02.860 be further along at 29, almost 30, I wouldn't want to do anything else this Saturday. And I know that

00:06:08.800 you can do all these things when you have kids and you're married and I understand. But the

00:06:14.040 effortlessness and ease of my life, just kind of focusing on myself and the Shakshuka I want to make 0.99

00:06:20.380 or the Beyonce concert I want to go to really pays off when I'm hard on myself for not being where

00:06:26.560 society tells me I should be in life. Okay. Even putting the Shakshuka aside, I have basically nothing 1.00

00:06:33.340 but sympathy for this woman because we all have friends who are like this woman. Some among us

00:06:40.500 listening right now might be in the same spot, which is you got duped by society. Our entire

00:06:46.580 culture told you to put off getting married, don't have kids, just focus on your career,

00:06:51.920 get an endless series of degrees. Don't go to church. Don't believe in anything above yourself.

00:06:57.240 Life is about nothing more than binging Netflix and traveling around the world and having fun

00:07:01.320 experiences and going to brunch. That's what our culture tells people from the age of,

00:07:06.760 I don't know, I guess from in the womb all the way up until the music stops, all the way up until

00:07:13.980 the brunches stop being quite so tasty and the Real Housewives reruns stop being so interesting

00:07:21.400 and the Shakshuka stops being so satisfying to make. So I have total sympathy for her. And if she were

00:07:29.280 merely trying to say that while her eyes and the tone of her voice and the very fact that she's

00:07:37.060 pleading for attention on social media shows that she's obviously not totally happy and she does wish

00:07:42.840 that she were married and she does wish she had kids, but it hasn't happened yet. And so she's going

00:07:46.940 to bear her difficulties with resignation until things turn around. I wouldn't even bring it up.

00:07:53.720 The problem here is that she is exalting the very things that make people miserable. And it's because 1.00

00:08:01.480 of a misunderstanding of joy and a misunderstanding of earthly happiness, which we'll get to in one

00:08:08.460 second. You know, they say that money can't buy happiness, but it can make you secure to have the

00:08:14.120 material things so that you can pursue happiness. And when you want to be materially secure, you got to

00:08:18.280 check out Birch Gold. Right now, text Knowles to 989898. Vladimir Putin called the U.S. dollar's

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00:09:18.240 If a central bank digital currency becomes a reality, it will be nice to have some gold to

00:09:23.340 depend upon. Text Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, to 989898. George Bernard Shaw had a very good line,

00:09:30.400 which is that hell is the place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

00:09:38.600 George Bernard Shaw was a socialist, atheist, playwright, and he was wrong about a great many

00:09:42.220 things. But even when he was wrong, he would have these piercing moments of insight in a lot of

00:09:46.620 his plays. G.K. Chesterton, the great conservative Catholic author, he was friends with Shaw. And this

00:09:52.920 is one of my favorite lines from Shaw. And even the whole context of this line is even better than

00:10:00.060 the single phrase itself. It comes from an act of a play called Don Juan in Hell. And the play is

00:10:09.040 man and Superman. And a woman, Anna, says, these devils are mocking me. I had better pray.

00:10:15.840 And the statue consoling her says, no, no, no, my child, do not pray. If you do, you will throw away

00:10:20.900 the main advantage of this place. They're in hell. Written over the gate here are the words,

00:10:26.340 leave every hope behind ye who enter, which is a line Shaw borrowed from Dante. Only think what a relief

00:10:32.100 that is. For what is hope, a form of moral responsibility. Here in hell, there is no hope.

00:10:38.500 And consequently, no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing

00:10:44.360 what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself. At this

00:10:51.220 moment, Don Juan sighs deeply. This is why people who retire often don't live very long. Some people

00:11:02.400 have a great retirement, but the people I've noticed who have a great retirement are the people who

00:11:07.440 find a purpose in retirement. Maybe the purpose is to manage their family. Maybe the purpose is to

00:11:14.840 get involved politically. Maybe the purpose is to take up a new hobby or to join a group or to

00:11:21.020 write your memoir or to investigate genealogy or to plan the family reunion. But the people who just

00:11:27.980 in retirement go out and decide they're going to hang out, they often don't make it very long.

00:11:34.620 They drink too much. They get depressed. We all get depressed. Why? Because happiness is not just

00:11:40.640 receiving passive pleasures. Happiness, our good buddy Uncle Aristotle noted about 2,400 years ago,

00:11:46.260 is excellent rational activity in accordance with virtue. So happiness involves activity,

00:11:53.040 and it's activity done very well, and it's that activity that is rational. It's not totally

00:11:57.460 irrational activity like going out and, I don't know, doing a bunch of drugs and making a nuisance

00:12:02.500 of yourself and worshiping idols in the desert. It's rational activity that is in accordance with

00:12:07.500 virtue. That's what's going to make us happy. What that woman is describing is broadly true.

00:12:14.080 When you don't have kids, you get to wake up late. You get to watch whatever TV shows you want.

00:12:18.220 You get to make shakshuka, if that is something that one would want to do. You get to go out and

00:12:25.180 drink too much. You get to go to whatever concert you want to go to, and that will make you depressed.

00:12:31.940 And this is why there are skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety. It's no coincidence that as

00:12:36.120 marriage rates plummet, as childbirth rates plummet, the rates of anxiety and depression are increasing

00:12:41.700 because brunch is not actually that fun. It's not fun for a long time. So I don't mean to just

00:12:47.640 scold this woman. I don't mean to mock her in any way, but it is very dangerous for people who,

00:12:56.280 as a self-defense mechanism or a coping mechanism, decide that they're going to exalt the behaviors

00:13:01.580 that make everybody miserable. That's a dangerous thing. The first step to fixing the problem,

00:13:07.140 and individuals and society broadly have a lot of problems right now, the first step is admitting

00:13:11.060 that you have a problem. And in this case, the problem is that the Beyonce concert and staying out

00:13:18.700 too late and drinking and staying in your bed all day and even eating shakshuka as your raison d'etre,

00:13:24.300 those are not the activities of happy, joyful people. Those are the kind of things that depressives do.

00:13:30.080 Depressives drink too much, and they stay in bed all day, and they're listless, and they kind of

00:13:34.080 wander around, and they're just not full of joy. So if we want to turn that around, you've got to

00:13:42.240 put that bad advice aside, stop coping, recognize there's a problem, and then fix it. You can fix it,

00:13:47.380 man. You don't need to stay in bed all day and listen to Beyonce and eat shakshuka. 0.99

00:13:51.420 Speaking of social bonds, Truth Social might be going the way of the dodo. Truth Social is Trump's

00:13:58.280 alternative to Twitter, and Truth Social was begun back in October of 2021, and now it might collapse

00:14:07.480 within days. And it might collapse because Trump Media and Technology Group, which is the parent

00:14:14.240 company for Truth Social, was going to merge with Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which is a

00:14:19.820 Miami-based company. And they were then going to go public via a SPAC. A SPAC is a special purpose

00:14:26.140 acquisition company. And anyway, this is all sort of a bunch of background business, blah, blah, blah.

00:14:31.760 But the upshot is the two companies had between 12 and 18 months to complete the merger. The deadline

00:14:36.400 has been extended at least five times. It's now scheduled for September 5th. Shareholder meeting

00:14:41.280 is scheduled. I suspect Trump doesn't want to keep Truth Social around anymore because I think Trump

00:14:46.060 wants to go back to Twitter, now known as X, because that's the way that he's going to reach the

00:14:50.960 most people. But what happens then? What happens if Truth Social collapses? Is this good for Trump?

00:14:56.800 Is this bad for Trump? I think basically it would be good for Trump. And I think it would be good for

00:15:01.680 Trump because, one, he can now save face since Elon bought Twitter. The point of Truth Social was to

00:15:09.460 give conservatives an alternative in social media. The libs controlled all of social media. So here's an

00:15:13.740 alternative. Well, then Elon Musk spent $44 billion and bought Twitter and has made Twitter much more

00:15:19.320 amenable to conservatives and has defended the right of conservatives to speak on Twitter and is

00:15:24.280 now potentially even suing left-wing activist groups that are trying to pressure advertisers to

00:15:29.620 defund Twitter. He's really put his money where our mouths are. So Trump can save face and say,

00:15:34.840 look, the thing that I wanted to accomplish with Truth Social has now been accomplished through Elon

00:15:39.300 Musk. So I'm going back to Twitter. I mean, the basic reason that Trump started Truth Social was that

00:15:45.120 he was deplatformed. He was kicked off of all these services, even when he was the sitting

00:15:49.060 president of the United States. Well, now he's been invited back on, and that is largely thanks

00:15:52.760 to Elon Musk. So he can say, look, mission accomplished, right? But what about the black 1.00

00:15:59.500 mark on his record here? Trump is going to be called a failure because Truth Social was a failure.

00:16:07.580 I don't think that matters, and I especially don't think that matters to Trump.

00:16:11.580 Trump has failed at many, many things. And I say this with love and admiration. He failed at the

00:16:17.480 vodka. He failed at the steaks. He failed at the airplanes. He failed at a lot, man. I'm not even

00:16:23.520 getting into what happened when he was president. Trump is also one of the most successful people

00:16:29.120 on planet Earth. That's undeniable. I know the Trump haters want to deny that. This man is extremely

00:16:34.600 successful. If you fly around in a gigantic jumbo jet for your entire adult life, you're a success.

00:16:40.860 If you get yourself elected president the first time that you really officially try it,

00:16:44.740 you're a big success. If you manage to arouse the ire of America's enemies abroad and the enemies

00:16:51.600 within the deep state apparatchiks who consistently tried to undermine his campaign and his presidency,

00:16:56.800 you're a success, man. You've actually done something. Are these in opposition? No, not at all.

00:17:03.320 The most successful people I know have also failed more than just about anybody I know.

00:17:10.620 And this is a really important lesson if you ever want to succeed in life. Successful people

00:17:18.020 tend to fail at more things than their critics ever even try. And pride, which is the queen of vice and

00:17:28.420 the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, pride talks in our ear and says, hey, don't do this thing. You

00:17:34.680 might fail at it. So don't even try. It'll be so humiliating. It'll be such a wound to your

00:17:40.400 pride if you try and fail at something. Successful people just ignore that voice and just try things.

00:17:47.940 And they often will throw spaghetti at the wall. Think about how many companies Trump has failed

00:17:54.100 at or Elon Musk has failed at or I don't know any of the successful people on planet Earth.

00:18:01.720 If you go military leaders, the failed military campaigns, for goodness sakes, Winston Churchill,

00:18:06.060 had he died before the Second World War, would have died a colossal failure. But he just kept

00:18:10.340 going. This is true of every great statesman throughout history and business leader and just

00:18:15.100 anybody who's ever done anything. And a really important lesson to take away, it's one of the

00:18:20.520 best lessons from Trump's public life. And look, maybe he's going to fail in the 2024 race. I don't

00:18:26.200 know. But the one thing I'm damn sure of is that he's going to try. And the only way that he's

00:18:31.700 possibly going to be successful, the only way that you or any of us is possibly going to be

00:18:34.920 successful at anything, is if we risk failure. Don't worry about failure. Successful people are

00:18:41.200 going to fail more than the losers ever even try. Speaking of not trying, Joe Biden is not even trying

00:18:48.960 to go visit East Palestine, Ohio. Do you remember, this was some months ago now,

00:18:53.420 our news cycle's fast, our memories, our attention spans are that of a fruit fly.

00:18:57.420 There was that major train derailment and chemical spill that poisoned this town in Ohio.

00:19:04.140 And Biden barely even wanted to mention it. Trump shows up there. J.D. Vance, the senator from

00:19:09.820 Ohio, conservative, shows up there. Demand, says, why won't Joe Biden show up here? And Joe Biden

00:19:15.680 finally came out and promised. He said, OK, I'm going to go to East Palestine, Ohio. Well, now here we

00:19:20.120 are months and months later. Joe still hasn't shown up. Here's his excuse.

00:19:23.920 You said in March that you would go to East Palestine, Ohio. You came here. How come you

00:19:29.320 haven't gone to East Palestine yet? Well, I haven't had the occasion to go to East

00:19:33.440 Palestine. There's a lot going on here, and I just haven't been able to break. I was 0.99

00:19:37.780 thinking whether I'd go to East Palestine this week, but I then was reminded I've got to go

00:19:43.060 literally around the world. I'm going from from Washington to India to Vietnam. And so it's going

00:19:52.380 to be wild. But we're making sure that East Palestine has what they need materially in order

00:19:59.800 to deal with their problems. His excuse as to why he hasn't visited this troubled American town that

00:20:07.440 was the site of a major corporate and government crime, let's call it what it is, just an absolute

00:20:14.780 negligence and incompetence, at least so egregious, that it poisoned this whole town.

00:20:19.920 And his excuse is, well, I can't go there because I got to go literally everywhere else on earth

00:20:25.780 before I go there. I've got to go anywhere else, anywhere and everywhere else than this town in

00:20:32.760 America. Joe Biden cares so little about East Palestine, Ohio, that in the months since that spill,

00:20:39.420 he hasn't even learned how to pronounce the name of the town.

00:20:42.120 He's made plenty of time to go visit Kiev. Oh, he can go visit Kiev just fine and Vietnam and this

00:20:51.760 place and that place. He just can't visit this troubled American town. Joe Biden can spend 382

00:20:58.540 days on vacation. Joe Biden has spent 40%, 4-0% of his presidency on vacation, just doesn't have that

00:21:05.100 time to visit East Palestine. A more perfect example of how little our ruling class cares about 1.00

00:21:14.360 America, I have not seen. A widening of the gulf between the elites and the actual American people

00:21:22.520 and a promise that populism will continue. From the ruling class, the beatings will continue until 0.82

00:21:31.240 morale improves. And from the now mostly the Republican party, but a little bit on the left

00:21:36.780 too, the populism is going to continue as our political order becomes so decadent, decays so

00:21:43.200 much, and the social bonds just collapse between the rulers and the ruled. Now, one little luxury here

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00:23:03.940 France has just prepared to enforce a ban on Muslim dress in schools. So this would be the abaya on 1.00

00:23:11.760 women, you know, where you can barely see any of the women. And this would be the, I forget the name 1.00

00:23:17.140 of the dress for the Muslim men, but that too. Kaput. Not allowed to wear that in French schools 1.00

00:23:22.500 anymore. And this is a really good idea. Not because I don't like the Muslims. I like the 1.00

00:23:27.680 Muslims very much. I have a great deal of respect for the Muslims. But because France is France, 1.00

00:23:31.820 and France should be allowed to be France. France doesn't need to be Saudi Arabia, and Italy doesn't

00:23:37.940 need to be Eritrea, and America doesn't need to be Guatemala. Countries should be allowed to have

00:23:45.100 their own national identity and culture. And people ought to be able to define what that is and

00:23:50.880 engage in their own traditional practices. I read this book over the weekend, made a little bit of

00:23:57.360 a splash, and it was a book in Italian. It hasn't been translated yet into English. And I thought,

00:24:02.660 you know, there are so few books in Italian that ever really seem to make the news. Dante, Petrarch,

00:24:08.160 Boccaccio, is pretty much it. You know, there's not a ton of Italian literature that tends to make

00:24:16.200 it up. One of these books that did is by this Italian general, Roberto Venacci, and it's called

00:24:22.060 Il Mondo Al Contrario, The World Upside Down. The point of this book is that we're living in,

00:24:29.800 obviously, in an upside-down world where people are losing their sovereignty, and traditional

00:24:35.640 practices are being called hateful and evil and being kicked out of society, and bizarre eccentricities

00:24:40.220 are being placed at the center of society. And the tiny little minorities of people, not even just 0.56

00:24:45.440 racial minorities, but like the minority of this imagined identity group or that bizarrely inclined 1.00

00:24:53.360 psychosexual identity group, they get to dominate, and they get to set all of the rules for all of 0.99

00:24:59.780 society, and that this is completely upside down. This is a book that became one of the best-selling

00:25:03.900 books in Italy over the last year, and it had to be self-published. And that tells you so much.

00:25:12.280 It's a very good thing that self-publishing is now advanced enough that anybody with a manuscript

00:25:17.680 can upload it to Amazon and have it mailed out in physical form, and it can become a bestseller.

00:25:22.880 That's great. But it's a very bad thing that many books that are commonsensical, that would become

00:25:28.840 bestsellers, have to be self-published, because no publisher would ever take it on. Because this book

00:25:34.820 by General Venacci, sorry, former General Venacci, he just got fired for publishing the book.

00:25:39.960 This book by former General Venacci was called Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Thisist, Thatist.

00:25:45.700 That's how you know it's going to be a good book. These days, when the liberal media says racist,

00:25:49.640 sexist, phobic, this kind of hateful, that kind of hateful, you know it's probably going to be a pretty

00:25:54.580 interesting book. And his firing for alleged homophobia proves his point. We're now in the

00:26:01.040 world upside down, that you can't extol a traditional, normal, Christian, just classical

00:26:08.240 conception of family life without being called a hateful bigot and losing your job for it. Even

00:26:13.080 if your job is to go kill your enemies, even if your job is a really old-school, manly kind of job,

00:26:19.180 you're going to lose it for them. The point of the book that I found the most interesting

00:26:23.340 is when he focuses on what he calls the dictatorship of minorities. Maybe minorities 0.99

00:26:29.820 of immigrant groups, maybe sexual minorities of groups who identify as whatever, whatever sort of

00:26:36.320 identities I'm not allowed to talk about on YouTube. I think you catch the drift. Maybe it's a religious 0.75

00:26:41.960 minority, maybe it's a cultural minority. But the notion that even a group that comprises three

00:26:49.680 people can upend the standards for everybody. Italy is a Catholic country. It's about as Catholic 0.97

00:26:58.280 a country as you could possibly get. And yet, increasingly, Italy is told from the secular

00:27:03.880 authorities, from the European Union, that they can't have Christmas displays and celebrations

00:27:09.880 in public. Because some people don't celebrate Christmas. Well, I guess that's true. The vast

00:27:18.280 majority of people in Italy celebrate Christmas. The vast, vast overwhelming majority celebrate

00:27:22.360 Christmas. So why can't they have their Christmas celebrations? Well, because of the rights of the

00:27:29.400 minorities. And so you see, and Vinacci never refers to this in the book, but what you're seeing is

00:27:35.700 an increasing tension between democracy and liberalism, which we use interchangeably today,

00:27:45.840 but they're actually opposed to one another. The liberals actually changed the Wikipedia page for

00:27:51.440 democracy to say that democracy is a form of liberalism. Liberalism came about a few hundred

00:27:56.640 years ago. Democracy has been around for millennia, okay? But liberalism is so totalitarian, it just

00:28:01.920 consumes everything and brings it into itself. And if you oppose it, then you have to be anti-democratic.

00:28:08.060 But that doesn't make any sense. Democracy is ruled by the majority. Liberalism, at its very best,

00:28:14.500 is supposed to be the protection of rights of minorities, which is a fine thing. You do want

00:28:21.200 to protect the legitimate rights of minorities. But as liberalism has advanced, everything has been

00:28:26.760 called a right. Things that are not rights at all have been called rights. Things that we're not

00:28:31.160 allowed to talk about on YouTube, like men wearing dresses in public, or pride parades, or all the

00:28:39.780 other sorts of things that are definitely going to get bleeped out on YouTube. Those are not rights.

00:28:42.840 Those are wrongs. Wrong things cannot be rights. And how do we understand rights? We understand rights

00:28:47.100 by examining abstract principles of justice, by examining the natural law, by using our faculties

00:28:54.420 of reason and our moral conscience to deduce conclusions about the good, the true, and the

00:29:01.920 beautiful. We can't do that anymore because we live in a radical skepticism. So the radical skepticism

00:29:07.400 is impelled by liberalism, which says everybody has the right to do whatever the hell they want at any

00:29:12.220 given time. And so it becomes this tyranny of subjectivism, this tyranny of relativism that now is

00:29:19.820 overwhelming the right of sovereign states to be their own people, to determine who comes in,

00:29:25.160 who gets the rights of citizens, and how people live. Very, very troubling because left to its own

00:29:34.780 devices, liberalism will just erase these cultures. They'll erase the people. They'll erase the customs.

00:29:40.260 They'll erase the religions. It'll erase everything. And because nature abhors a vacuum, something else is 0.99

00:29:47.020 going to come in, in its place because everybody's got to serve somebody. So this is, this is also why

00:29:52.660 you're seeing increasing populism. This is why fashionable, squishy Republican types used to make

00:29:58.200 fun of the notion of the war on Christmas. Oh, those bitter clinging, deplorable idiots. They care about

00:30:03.960 Christmas. Who cares? It's no big deal. Just say happy holidays or whatever. No, if, if, if we give

00:30:11.880 up Christmas, what are we as a country? Oh, those deplorable idiots, they care about immigration. Oh, 1.00

00:30:19.820 stop it. Just stop being so racist and xenophobic. If we give up borders, what is our country? If we give

00:30:27.820 up, if we give up our practices, the people who make up the nation, what we believe in, now increasingly

00:30:36.720 our right to self-government, what are we? We're nothing. We just become individual consumers.

00:30:46.100 We're just here. We, we end up exactly where that poor woman who was pretending that she's really 0.94

00:30:51.400 happy, childless and husbandless at 29. We end up right where she is, which is, yeah, okay. We don't

00:30:56.820 have any social bonds. We don't have any purpose in life. We don't have anything that we're aiming at.

00:31:01.660 We don't have anything that really gets us out of the bed in the morning, but we do have a bunch of

00:31:05.360 cheap crap, but we do. GDP went up a little bit. We are, we are an economic zone. Well, who cares?

00:31:15.720 How stupid do we have to be to find out that money doesn't actually buy you happiness and that

00:31:20.800 we shouldn't worship mammon? People are so desperate for meaning that they're going to the desert right 0.98

00:31:27.420 now to take a bunch of drugs and have a bunch of orgies and worship actual fire idols and then be

00:31:34.040 washed out in the flood because of that, which, you know, again, I don't want to read too deeply

00:31:38.140 into it, but that's how desperate people are for meaning. Okay. So that's the word, that is the

00:31:44.020 world upside down and you can expect rates of anxiety to go up, prescription drugs for depression

00:31:50.620 pills to go up. You can expect the life expectancy to continue to decline because of deaths of despair.

00:31:55.480 You can expect marriage rates to continue to plummet. You can expect birth rates to continue to

00:31:58.860 plummet until we flip that world back right side up. Now, speaking of confused people

00:32:03.860 and things I can't talk about on YouTube, another young lady went viral, sobbing, crying because she

00:32:13.580 was called a lady. Honestly, I don't know what to do, but like, there was like a really bad experience.

00:32:23.480 Basically, I was just getting a drink at the bar and they called both and I ladies. After they were

00:32:30.320 done drinking, I went up and I was like, some people don't refer to themselves as ladies, but it's okay

00:32:37.380 that you didn't know. I'm in a gay bar so I should be safe. The bad turned around. They got so mad at me

00:32:46.180 and they took the drink away from my wife and I. He hit the bar like because he was like, are you

00:32:54.020 serious? You're doing the same thing to me. How? And then they kicked us out. I didn't think that was

00:33:01.480 gonna happen. Like, how am I supposed to feel? This is the first time that I like told somebody I felt

00:33:06.440 brave enough to tell somebody my identity. I just wanted to let him know and I told him it's okay

00:33:12.540 that he didn't know. He was still mad at me for being myself and for my wife being themselves.

00:33:21.280 Just her. And for my wife being themselves. That's a, I don't know if I believe this video.

00:33:29.900 The performance doesn't seem very persuasive to me. So it's probably just a ploy for attention.

00:33:36.440 And kind of some kind of troll on social media. But let's say it's not. Let's be really charitable

00:33:40.740 about it and say that this woman's really upset because she went to a bar with her wife 1.00

00:33:46.480 as though that were possible. And they went up into this bar and the bartender said,

00:33:53.120 hey ladies, what can I get you? And they broke down sobbing because this was such an attack on their

00:33:59.120 identities. One, it shows you that they know that they're not really men. It shows you that

00:34:09.040 their confidence and their true identity is a little bit weak. If someone called me a woman,

00:34:14.460 I'd probably just laugh or say, hey, what are you calling a woman? And move on with my life and I

00:34:19.820 wouldn't, wouldn't sob into a camera. But, but even beyond that,

00:34:23.600 she says, well, it was a gay bar, but it was just these gay men and they should accept me because

00:34:30.960 we're queer too or whatever. You think, listen, if you are, it's hard to tell these days, but let's

00:34:35.260 say you are two women, but you say you're man or whatever, you're two women. And you think it's

00:34:40.160 really smart for us two women to go to a gay men's bar. They'll accept us there. There is no 0.99

00:34:46.640 group of people that the gay men bar attendees are less interested in seeing than two women.

00:34:53.660 And you can dress up and you can pretend to be something other than you are, but

00:34:57.340 the gay guys aren't interested in you and you shouldn't be interested in them. And you shouldn't 1.00

00:35:03.560 whine and cry when places that are not for you are not, actually are fairly welcoming to you,

00:35:09.920 but are still like somehow almost a little bit tethered to reality. But then this raises a question.

00:35:16.640 How are we supposed to think about the weird sex stuff? Because we live in the world upside down

00:35:22.100 now and the weird sex stuff dominates the headlines all the time and we can't avoid it. You can't just

00:35:26.220 say, well, just put it out of your mind, stop thinking about it so much. It's everywhere. It's

00:35:30.720 in our schools, it's in our businesses, it's in the streets, it's in the seven pride months that we

00:35:36.160 celebrate now, the pride year, and that's just a full pride year. And it's everywhere. So what are we

00:35:41.720 supposed to do about it? And Vanacci, the guy who wrote The World Upside Down, he makes a good point.

00:35:47.120 He says, look, now the gay stuff is everywhere. In the Middle Ages, it was suppressed because that

00:35:53.600 was when the church was at the height of its power and all the weird sex stuff is contrary to church

00:35:58.280 teaching and scripture and sacred tradition. And so they kind of tamped that stuff down. But way back

00:36:04.900 in antiquity, there were prevalent homosexual acts. You read about it in Plato and the symposium

00:36:11.020 is a book about a big gay dinner party, kind of. We know there's that old line about the difference

00:36:16.900 between the Greeks and the Romans. They're arguing over who had the better civilization. The Greeks say,

00:36:22.460 we invented soufflaki. The Romans say, we invented pizza. The Greeks say, we have the Parthenon.

00:36:28.760 The Romans say, we built the Colosseum. The Greeks say, okay, well, we've got you here because we

00:36:33.720 invented sex. And the Romans say, yes, but we introduced it to women. So we know that for a 0.99

00:36:39.060 long time, there's been kind of weird sort of gay stuff in antiquity, and they looked on it 1.00

00:36:43.920 without total moral appropriate. Well, Vanacci makes this good point. He says, those are,

00:36:49.800 they're not the same thing. The way the ancient Greeks looked at weird sex stuff and the way that

00:36:54.040 modern gay rights people do, totally different things. Because for the ancients, the weird sex stuff 1.00

00:37:00.900 was simply a matter of sensual pleasure, a way for these guys who had these inclinations to just

00:37:09.760 have a bit of fun and amuse themselves. It never infringed upon the family.

00:37:17.640 Men didn't get gay married in ancient Athens. Men didn't try to adopt children in ancient Athens

00:37:26.160 together or to have surrogates pay some woman to rent her womb and then implant a zygote or an 0.99

00:37:35.640 embryo into. They didn't do any of that weird stuff. They just, they did their weird sex stuff and then

00:37:40.400 they were normal in public. And that's what's going on now. And so Vanacci says, if we just went back to

00:37:49.020 that understanding of things, if the LGBT people would just, they could go have their fun in the,

00:37:56.080 in the privacy of their own homes, we're not going to be sending the purity police around.

00:38:00.420 But when you, when you insist on upending the most basic political institutions,

00:38:05.560 when you insist on upending the family, that's the fundamental unit of society,

00:38:09.260 then that's a problem. And then we've got to talk about it and we've got to have an opinion.

00:38:13.100 And we can either allow that to happen and allow the complete destruction of our politics and our

00:38:16.840 entire sense of reality, or we can come in and say, no, guys, sorry. Sorry, lady. You're actually 1.00

00:38:25.300 a lady. You're not a man. Sorry, same-sex couple. You might be very close to one another and you might 1.00

00:38:31.220 have a lovely relationship, but you're not the same thing as marriage. Sorry, people in all sorts of

00:38:37.780 disordered backgrounds. You don't get to just buy a child and you don't get to just make one in a 0.97

00:38:41.600 laboratory and commoditize human beings. No, the answer is no. Because if we don't say no,

00:38:46.840 we're going to be living completely upside down with our feet in the air and our heads on the

00:38:49.900 ground. You know, we have a very exciting offer coming up for all of our Daily Wire members.

00:38:55.900 Early access to a first look at the highly anticipated 10-part original series of Candace

00:39:00.160 Owens, Convicting a Murderer. Early access to view this series is September 7th,

00:39:05.740 only on Daily Wire+. Take a look at this teaser.

00:39:08.240 Coming up on Convicting a Murderer. Part of me don't want to believe that he did this. The blood

00:39:13.740 that was on that back area was indicative of the head wound. My brother likes to push a lot of

00:39:19.120 people around. I don't give a f*** about anything. I ain't gotta listen to nobody. How were these

00:39:24.020 filmmakers able to convince so many people that a man like Stephen Avery is innocent?

00:39:29.060 How many times did he stab her?

00:39:32.500 Once. And show me where.

00:39:35.300 Right here.

00:39:36.280 They gave him power.

00:39:37.400 They're trying to get everything that I need that they get.

00:39:39.220 It's not good for an Avery to have power.

00:39:41.740 I told you all along, keep your f*** about shot.

00:39:44.600 I can hurt Stephen. I'm not going to lie for him no more. I can't do it.

00:39:48.660 Watch Convicting a Murderer, a new 10-part series on Daily Wire+.

00:39:52.300 Now, early access to watch Convicting a Murderer will be available for Daily Wire Plus members

00:39:57.840 on September 7th. The official premiere for Convicting a Murderer will take place on X,

00:40:03.360 that platform formerly known as Twitter. On September 8th at 9 p.m. Eastern, Candace will 0.99

00:40:07.200 be live chatting with special guests at the X event at 5 p.m. So head on over to X to join the

00:40:11.280 conversation. Full series will be available only on Daily Wire+. Head on over to dailywire.com

00:40:16.280 slash subscribe. Use code TRUTH, T-R-U-T-H, for 25% off your Daily Wire Plus

00:40:22.260 subscription. Everyone's talking about it. Everybody, look, look, it's everywhere, okay?

00:40:26.760 Candace's take on this series is really interesting, so do not miss out and subscribe today.

00:40:32.920 My favorite comment on Friday is from Junior3170, who says,

00:40:37.540 My late father told me about the 70s. He said it was hell. Everything was garbage from the cars to

00:40:43.160 the music. I couldn't even get normal jeans by the end. Fair enough. And this will impact the

00:40:49.880 presidential race, of course, because we are living in the 1970s. We, the same sort of economic

00:40:55.780 problems, energy crises, massive inflation, social breakdown. A D.C. grocery store, giant grocery

00:41:07.040 store, is a Southeast D.C., has removed name brands from the store. It's got generic brands,

00:41:13.920 but no more name brands. Advil, Colgate, Tide, it's gone. And it's gone because people keep stealing.

00:41:20.780 And the shop owner, he says, I don't want to do this. I'd like to sell the name brand products,

00:41:24.800 but the reality is that Tide is not a profitable item in this store because it keeps getting stolen.

00:41:29.720 In many instances, people stock the product, and within two hours, it's gone. So it's not on the

00:41:33.760 shelf anyway. You see, he's seen theft rise tenfold in the last five years. This is

00:41:42.040 literally why we can't have nice things, just even material things we can't have.

00:41:50.820 We sell out all of the social capital so that we can have cheap consumer goods. And the irony of it

00:41:57.040 is we end up without even the nice consumer goods because people are stealing them so much that they

00:42:02.220 can't even put them on the shelves. If we cease to be a coherent society, as increasingly is

00:42:09.000 happening, and we simply become individual economic units just sharing the same space,

00:42:14.780 which is the vision the left has for us. And frankly, it's the vision that a lot of the right

00:42:18.900 has for us too. We're just out there. We just care about cutting our taxes and just making our

00:42:23.280 money and leave me alone and forget about those social questions. Well, okay, if we're all just

00:42:27.340 individuals living in the same space, then you know what's going to happen? All the things that

00:42:32.380 keep us behaving, community, shame, a sense of a fear of divine retribution, concern for our souls

00:42:41.580 and our reputation in the community, even the law, that's all going to go away. And so what's going

00:42:46.280 to happen is first, there's going to be disorder as we're seeing now. And then almost maybe even worse

00:42:52.200 than the disorder, there's going to be a miserable kind of order imposed on us. Because, this is a

00:42:58.680 point I've made a number of times before, there will be order. There will be order. The state

00:43:06.440 will protect itself. So either we can behave ourselves and act in accordance with virtue and

00:43:15.080 religion and morality, or the state is going to come in and impose that. But there will be order

00:43:20.920 eventually. And the kind of order that's going to be imposed on us is going to be a miserable one.

00:43:28.600 Because it's going to be an order without the uplift and the inspiration of religion,

00:43:34.680 without the natural bonds of family, which disappear. I mean, they disappear in the sense

00:43:39.080 that people just stop having family. They stop getting married. They stop having kids. It's going

00:43:43.000 to be one without tradition. We'll have gotten rid of those traditions. It's going to be one without

00:43:47.140 a sense of loyalty to the nation and a bond of kinship to the people. It's just going to be

00:43:51.440 a heavy-handed order of sticks and carrots. The stick is going to be increasing punishments from the

00:44:02.120 government, like locking people up for ordinary basic political dissent, as we're seeing all around

00:44:07.020 this. And the carrot is going to be drugs and promiscuous sex and Netflix and staying out late and drinking

00:44:16.020 and going to Beyonce concerts and not getting out of your bed until 10 in the morning. One of them is

00:44:22.040 George Orwell. One of them is Aldous Huxley. One of them is 1984. One of them is Brave New World. And it's not

00:44:26.780 going to be one or the other. You're going to get them both at the same time. Do you want that to be your

00:44:31.040 society? No? Well, then we've got to have the other stuff, the tradition and the coherence among

00:44:39.280 the people and the religion and the being normal. That's what we're going to have to have. Now, I teased

00:44:50.660 you. I teased you earlier. I said that we were going to get to COVID and Fauci. I'm going to leave this

00:44:57.680 as a little bit of a tease for tomorrow. But all I'll say for now is you've seen the masks start to

00:45:03.600 come back in Hollywood. Lionsgate instituted a mask mandate. Morris Brown College in Atlanta,

00:45:09.420 Rutgers University bringing the masks back. Oh, just a couple of weeks to slow the spread.

00:45:13.640 You're seeing New York saying if you're in public, maybe now start to wear the masks.

00:45:17.460 Jill Biden's apparently come down with COVID. How she knows, I don't know why people still test

00:45:21.060 for this ridiculous ailment. I don't know. Well, I do know. It's because of the 2024 election.

00:45:28.880 But Fauci is starting to come back on TV. But the twist here is CNN is taking Dr. Fauci to task for

00:45:38.760 being wrong. Why is that? What's going on? What do the libs have up their sleeves? We'll get to that

00:45:45.940 tomorrow because right now we've got to get to the member block. The rest of the show continues now.

00:45:49.500 I know it's Tuesday, but we didn't have Music Monday because that was Labor Day. So what Professor

00:45:58.180 Jacob has said in his dubious wisdom is that today we're not going to have Tranny Tuesday. We're going 0.98

00:46:06.220 to have Music Monday on Tuesday. And then tomorrow for Woke Wednesday, we're going to lump in Trans 1.00

00:46:13.700 Tuesday and Woke Wednesday together in one day and then Theology Thursday and then Fake

00:46:19.400 Headline Friday. My head is spinning just thinking about it. The rest of the show continues now. You

00:46:23.960 do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use code Knowles, K-N-A-W-L-E-S, at checkout for two months

00:46:27.820 months. It's free on all annual plans.

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The Michael Knowles Show - September 05, 2023

Ep. 1323 - Burning Man Traps Over 70,000 People

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