The Michael Knowles Show - September 05, 2023


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


Episode Stats


Length

46 minutes

Words per minute

173.83333

Word count

8,154

Sentence count

598

Harmful content

Misogyny

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

32

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A woman goes viral on TikTok and explains why she s happy not to be married and not to have children because she gets to sleep in late and go to concerts and things like that. Plus, a story about a woman who s gone viral because she likes to drink too much and doesn t have kids.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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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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00:21:58.040 Right now, go to GoodRanchers.com, use code Knowles. I don't know about you, but this summer heat in
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00:22:57.100 at GoodRanchers.com. GoodRanchers.com. American meat delivered. Speaking of foreign places,
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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