In the first episode of the new season of The Michael Knowles Show, host Michael Kinsley talks about global warming alarmists, their hypocrisy, and why they don t actually believe their own rhetoric. He explains why the climate alarmists have come to dominate world affairs.
00:05:48.060How is this woman so worried about your plastic water bottles?
00:05:52.940This is the climate religion's version of scrupulosity.
00:05:58.060Scrupulosity is an obsession over sin, a neurotic obsession over sin.
00:06:04.840So, in true religion, you would be obsessed with whether you had wished death on somebody, whether you had stolen something, whether you had had impure thoughts, whether you had violated actual moral laws.
00:06:20.740And in the climate religion, which is a parody of true religion, and it's a return, I suppose, of the old nature-worshipping pagan religions.
00:06:34.980There, what you obsess over is whether a drop of water got stuck in your bottle before you sent it off to the landfill.
00:06:45.120And they don't stop to think that, hold on a second, I'm worried about a drop of water in my water bottle.
00:06:50.700Meanwhile, John Kerry is flying off to Arabia in a private jet, spewing 20 times the pollution into the air that he would otherwise spew if he were flying commercially.
00:07:17.740His private jet is a drop in the bucket when we talk about pollution.
00:07:22.820Also, all the private jets aren't going to cause the end of the world.
00:07:25.700Also, all the plastic water bottles are not going to cause the end of the world.
00:07:29.560Also, the nature-worshipping pagan religions are false.
00:07:33.660And they were supplanted for a time by the true religion.
00:07:38.300And now we're living in something much closer to the earliest days of Christianity than we are to, say, 1,000 years ago or 500 years ago at the very height of Christian civilization.
00:07:50.060We are living in a brave new world animated by a different set of beliefs.
00:07:57.760And you're seeing this not just in the environmental nonsense.
00:08:00.800You're seeing this more distressingly in other aspects of life, including touching on the family.
00:08:06.200Right now, IVF and surrogacy have returned to the news for reasons that we don't have to get into.
00:08:13.680This is, to me, the clearest example of moral confusion, not just in our culture, but even on the right.
00:08:22.640There are many people on the right, many prominent conservatives, who don't understand why IVF and surrogacy and a market for couples who otherwise can't have children, like homosexuals, to purchase babies.
00:09:13.900The reason that conservatives oppose abortion and IVF and surrogacy is because we believe that people are not property to be purchased and discarded at will.
00:11:24.540We know it's wrong, even if some people can't articulate why.
00:11:27.800It's harder for conservatives to understand the problems with IVF and surrogacy more broadly.
00:11:36.500So it's so clear when it's two guys who go out to look at a catalog and they pick some woman.
00:11:42.240They're treating women like objects, like commodities to be purchased.
00:11:47.140And they say, yeah, I want a woman with blonde hair, and I want her to have gone to Princeton, and I want her to work in banking.
00:11:54.440Ooh, yeah, maybe we'll get a future financier in our family, and I want her to have blue eyes.
00:11:59.380That's obviously degrading and dehumanizing.
00:12:02.400Then they find some poor woman who wants to make 20 or 30 grand, often in third world countries, or at least in struggling countries like Ukraine.
00:12:13.220They will say, okay, I'm going to pick that woman.
00:12:15.840I'm going to rent her womb, and we're going to implant these babies in her womb, and then she's going to gestate our children for nine months.
00:12:24.440And then we are going to do all of this with the express purpose of ripping that child away, not only from his biological mother, his genetic mother, whom he'll never know, but also from the nearest thing to a mother he's ever known, the woman in whose body he has been, whose voice he has heard for nine months.
00:12:41.080We're just going to rip him away from that person, not give him the comfort of that person holding him when he's born, and we're going to do that to satisfy our natural desires but our disordered behavior because we have chosen, these two men have chosen to be in a relationship that is intrinsically sterile, but in order to accommodate their desires over the needs and best interests of a child, we're going to create a kid to deny him his mother.
00:13:05.660Does your mother matter? Do you like your mother? Do you think your mother had any positive influence in your life growing up?
00:13:12.420Well, you're denying that. Obviously, we all do. We all love our mothers.
00:13:15.520Even if you have a mother who's not that great, even you still probably love your mother.
00:13:19.980You are now depriving your child of one of the most important connections that any human being can have.
00:13:25.940That is obviously terribly, terribly wrong, and the men who do this, a lot of them probably don't know that, and a lot of them have been blinded to that, and the culture has told all of these men that it's totally fine, and the culture has told men that men and women are totally interchangeable and there's no difference between them, and the law has even told men that they have every right to do this.
00:13:45.640So I don't even blame them all personally. Generally, they know not what they do, but it's terribly, terribly evil.
00:13:52.920But put the homosexuals aside for a second. They don't deserve to bear all the blame for this, because the traditional view is that IVF and surrogacy are wrong, period, for everybody.
00:14:06.460Why is that? Someone wrote to me, said, Michael, you know, I can't believe you said this, because I can somewhat intellectually understand why IVF and surrogacy might be bad in theory, but I've got nieces who were conceived through IVF, and I'm glad that my nieces are alive, so go F yourself, Michael, because anything that would allow my nieces to be alive, I think is totally fine, you big jerk, you Bible-thumping, moralizing jerk.
00:14:34.000Okay, all right, hold on, calm down, calm down, I hear you, I hear you. I'm sure your nieces are great. I'm sure your nieces are wonderful, let's say, and your nieces have a right to life, and it's good that your nieces exist.
00:14:49.540The problem for IVF and surrogacy is that no ends, no matter how good, justify immoral means.
00:14:59.080No ends, no matter how good, justify actions that are intrinsically evil to achieve them.
00:15:07.160This is the same kind of logic that we would apply to, say, rape.
00:15:11.340A child who is conceived in rape, I know some, they have a right to life.
00:15:22.240Had your nieces, God forbid, been conceived in the case of rape, you would say, I love my nieces, and how dare you suggest they shouldn't exist, and how dare you say, I'm not suggesting they shouldn't exist.
00:15:31.380I'm not suggesting they don't have a right to life.
00:15:32.860I'm not suggesting they're not good at all.
00:15:35.240But let's follow this idea to its logical conclusion.
00:15:39.260Does the fact that your niece's existence is good, and they have a right to life, does that fact justify rape?
00:15:52.480Likewise, good ends can be wonderful, and we can celebrate them, but they don't justify immoral means.
00:15:59.920The reason surrogacy and IVF are immoral is because they interfere into the family, they break up the nucleus, the very building block of political society, they separate the reproductive from the conjugal act, they establish the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of human life, and they can have all sorts of unintended consequences.
00:16:28.920Every six months, it seems, there's some story in the news about how some couples who did IVF, whoopsie-daisy, the test tubes got switched, and an Asian couple gave birth to a black baby, so they knew, hold on, this isn't our baby, and the black couple gave birth to a red-headed white baby, and then this is, oh, whoopsie-daisy, we switched the test tubes around.
00:16:51.640Well, now there's a legal case, who's my child?
00:16:56.460What else are some of the unintended consequences of IVF?
00:17:01.360Well, usually in IVF, many human beings are created, embryos are made, and then you use one or two of them, maybe you try to implant multiple, and then, oh, too many took, okay, so we're going to have to abort a couple of them.
00:17:16.280Or you only do one or two at a time, then you put the rest in a freezer, and okay, we actually don't want a third child, so then those human beings remain frozen on ice in perpetuity.
00:17:32.020Well, how do you think you get the sperm for IVF?
00:17:35.420Listen, some of you might not be as exacting on your views of sexual morality as, say, the Catholic Church, but acts that we would all agree are at least somewhat shameful, you wouldn't go bragging about them.
00:17:45.900Those are involved in getting the raw materials, and it's just so damned clinical, and it's just so degrading and dehumanizing.
00:17:55.580And I cannot stress this enough, it establishes the domination of technology owned by private enterprise or the state over the very origin and destiny of human life, which is very, very disordered.
00:18:14.580Let those who have ears to hear, let them hear it.
00:18:16.980But we all know, because it's just so obviously repugnant, that it is wrong for two guys to create a kid in a test tube, to purchase a woman, to commodify human beings, to treat people as property.
00:18:29.940It's wrong to do that, and we see that, and we have that natural reaction.
00:18:34.020Well, perhaps we ought to apply some reason then and investigate why it's wrong and how that might apply to more people just than those who are a little light in the loafers and eager to have children without doing the things properly necessary to have children.
00:18:51.160One way that one can fight against this new world order that is being foisted upon us is to mock it, which is what The Daily Wire has done, which is, I won't belabor the point.
00:20:00.520I think it was actually Hassan Piker, who is Cenk Uygur, the Young Turks guy's nephew.
00:20:07.060He said that Lady Ballers is like Mrs. Doubtfire, but evil.
00:20:12.620And the funniest thing about this review, the ironic thing about this review, is that it reminded me that Mrs. Doubtfire itself is evil, because Mrs. Doubtfire promotes divorce.
00:20:25.160I hadn't seen Mrs. Doubtfire in so long.
00:20:27.240Mrs. Doubtfire is about this family where a woman divorces her husband, and they've got a kid, and the husband wants to see the kid, and this wife doesn't want him to see the kid.
00:20:36.400And so he dresses up like a woman and becomes a housekeeper, and so he at least gets to interact with the kid in this very degraded way where he has to pretend to be an old woman.
00:20:46.180And it shows the importance of family.
00:21:24.520So, I like the comparison to Mrs. Doubtfire, because there's cross-dressing and it's funny.
00:21:29.860I guess you would just say, though, Lady Balders is like Mrs. Doubtfire, but good.
00:21:34.960But good, but wholesome, but not ultimately depraved.
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00:26:32.900Even some conservatives don't like Henry Kissinger because he had been a fixture of American foreign policy for so long.
00:26:39.400Some saw him as an emblem of the deep state.
00:26:42.600I think we're going to miss Henry Kissinger, actually.
00:26:47.680And the reason I think we're going to miss Henry Kissinger is because Henry Kissinger for 50 years, I guess his career really was about 75 years.
00:26:59.900The man was Secretary of State to Richard Nixon.
00:27:01.580But Henry Kissinger injected into American foreign policy a strain of realism, a strain of constraint that many people on the left and right today refuse to accept.
00:27:21.740So people attack him for being a cold warrior and to waging all sorts of wars, especially in East Asia.
00:27:29.600But Henry Kissinger was just as interested in restraint.
00:27:33.080He was more interested in restraint, I think, than he was in bombing people.
00:27:36.080The same cannot be said of the neoconservatives of the Bush era.
00:27:39.800The same cannot be said of the liberal imperialists of the Obama era.
00:27:44.640I'm thinking of people, especially like Hillary Clinton, who never met a country they didn't want to invade and bomb and tear up and remake after America's own image.
00:27:52.600Their vision of America's own image, not the American founding image, not the vision that has animated America for most of our history.
00:27:58.380They want to go fly pride flags in Kandahar.
00:28:03.400Even on the Iraq war, which Kissinger supported, Kissinger's justification for the Iraq war was not the kind of liberal idealism we heard from the Bush administration or that we heard from the Democrats during the Bush administration.
00:28:15.680It was not that we need to spread democracy and we're going to turn these Pashtun tribes into thriving Madisonian mini republics within five years or something.
00:28:25.960What we heard from Kissinger was, America was attacked, we need to show tanks rolling through the Middle East to scare off our enemies.
00:28:35.480Henry Kissinger took realism so far that he famously, during the 1970s, told Richard Nixon that if the Soviet Union were sending Jews to gas chambers within its territories, that that would not affect the national interest of the United States.
00:28:54.120But it shows you a man who kept the American national interest at the very fore of his thinking in a scandalous way, actually.
00:29:04.020And a little bit, at least a little bit of thinking in the national interest is a very good thing.
00:29:13.580Because when you ignore the national interest and you only think about everyone else all around the world and how we need to send women to school in Afghanistan and how we need to, I don't know, carve up China so that the Dalai Lama has a nicer time in Tibet.
00:29:29.840Whatever your foreign hobby horse is, then you ignore your own country and the country falls to pot and our borders break open and our economy collapses and civil disorder goes through the roof and there's crime all over.
00:29:41.920And then you won't have any power to impose any kind of influence on the world, much less to serve your own constituents.
00:29:47.920Henry Kissinger, his passing represents the loss of a broad strategic vision that stretches beyond just a year or two, that stretches beyond even one political party or the other.
00:30:06.260Henry Kissinger famously had friends in both political, he was a Republican, but he was a Rockefeller Republican.
00:30:10.480And he had friends in both political parties, very influential with Republicans, buddies with Hillary Clinton, everybody.
00:30:22.380And so America becomes much less strategic, both in terms of its long-term thinking and in terms of in any way considering its own national interests.
00:30:32.980I, for one, pour one out for Henry the K.
00:30:36.400Here's another thing Henry Kissinger was right about.
00:30:38.160Henry Kissinger said in the 90s that NATO should not expand eastward as the Soviet Union collapses, as the U.S. wins the Cold War, and more importantly even than winning the Cold War, we are able to watch the withdrawal of the Soviet Union, the decline of the arms race, the widening of American influence without falling into World War III.
00:31:06.860And Kissinger, along with other smart people like Sam Nunn, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, George Kennan, the author of the Long Telegram that establishes U.S. Cold War policy, all of them say, don't expand NATO eastward.
00:31:20.900That will unnecessarily provoke Russia for no strategic advantage whatsoever.
00:31:25.740It will increase the likelihood of war.
00:31:28.680Henry Kissinger, sadly, was able to see his prediction proven entirely correct before his death.
00:31:35.860Because the reason that Russia invaded Ukraine is because of all of the saber-rattling, the promise by the leader of Ukraine that Ukraine would join NATO, the European Union and NATO.
00:31:48.740The influence of the CIA in the Maidan revolution in 2014 that ousted the pro-Russian leader of Ukraine and installed pro-Western leaders of Ukraine.
00:31:58.200And Russia looking at that and saying, look, NATO has already been encroaching all the way up to our borders.
00:32:03.440This represents an unacceptable security risk, especially when we're talking about Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe.
00:32:09.480So then Russia decides, I think in their national interest, I'm not saying it was good or right objectively, I'm not saying the war was justified, but it certainly was in the Russian national interest to invade Ukraine.
00:32:20.400At which point Kissinger said, you know, this was a major blunder and we in many ways provoked it by expanding NATO, but the die is cast.
00:33:11.580But we don't have a lot of strategic thinking these days.
00:33:14.320We have a lot of pie in the sky, abstract, idealistic, ideological thinking based on false premises.
00:33:21.500And we're going to miss people like Henry Kissinger, hated though he may have been in many corners.
00:33:25.500Speaking of foreign alliances, Joe Biden has just proposed something that is really unpopular in both parties and many quarters of the American public.
00:33:38.700And that is to make aid to Israel conditional.
00:33:43.040I've encouraged the prime minister to focus on trying to reduce the number of casualties while he is attempting to eliminate Hamas, which is a legitimate objective he has.
00:34:05.960And I don't know how long it will take.
00:34:08.580My expectation and hope is that as we move forward, the rest of the Arab world and the region is also putting pressure on all sides to slow this down, to bring this to an end as quickly as we can.
00:34:22.440Mr. President, do you have the chance to be extended by a few days or more?
00:35:16.760This might be the first time I've ever said this about Joe Biden, not just in his presidency, but in his entire public life, certainly.
00:35:22.980And his public life is longer than my entire life.
00:35:25.860So certainly, since I've been aware of Joe Biden, everything he said there is right.
00:35:30.840He says, I want the prime minister to try to minimize civilian casualties, even as he pursues the legitimate military objective of completely destroying Hamas.
00:37:28.860The 2,000-pound bombs that the Netanyahu government was dropping on refugee camps where there was massive loss of civilian life.
00:37:37.680I don't really think those should be part of our aid.
00:37:41.600So are you urging the administration, are you telling your colleagues and the administration not to allow American dollars to be used for those bombs?
00:37:50.800Yeah, I don't want to spend money on those bombs.
00:37:54.400He doesn't, the Democrat senator wants the U.S. to give aid to Israel, but not weapons.
00:38:02.600Does this guy think that Israel needs us for baked goods?
00:38:26.960Israel has plenty of money and plenty of stuff and plenty of food.
00:38:33.300The only thing that Israel needs from the United States is weaponry.
00:38:37.540It's bombs and guns and money that will go toward those things.
00:38:41.580In fact, in fact, every dollar that we give to Israel, we should assume is going toward bombs and guns.
00:38:49.380Because money is fungible and Israel is facing what it considers to be an existential war, a second war of independence.
00:38:57.720And so they're going to be redirecting all of their resources, including their citizenry, all of whom virtually serve in the military at some point, except for the small number of religious objectors.
00:39:09.580They're going to be directing all of their resources toward weaponry.
00:39:16.500If this guy is saying, if this guy doesn't think that Israel should exist as a state and he's got problems with, I don't know, how it was founded, how it conducts itself, whatever.
00:39:25.780Whatever is problem, it's settler colonialism, whatever.
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00:41:56.780Now, speaking of the presidency, a presidential candidate for the GOP has just picked up a big endorsement, and that would be Nikki Haley picking up the endorsement of, drumroll please, Paul Ryan.
00:42:18.200Do not discount the Americans for Prosperity endorsement of Nikki Haley two days ago.
00:42:24.100The reason that that's a really big deal is you could say that Ron DeSantis' big advantage over Nikki Haley was his ground game in Iowa, which is impressive.
00:42:33.360Americans for Prosperity has an extremely impressive ground game.
00:42:36.700This is the Koch Network's ground game.
00:42:41.080So not only does that level her up in Iowa with Ron DeSantis, that gives her a ground game in all these other states, and the counter plays to her advantage.
00:42:49.560So I'm not saying I'm all for Nikki Haley.
00:43:16.620To quote Henry Kissinger, the die is cast.
00:43:19.580She has now been endorsed by the Koch Network, which is the biggest establishment, chamber of commerce, don't focus on the social issues kind of right-wing group.
00:43:33.120And it's even more significant here because Paul Ryan is on the board of News Corp, which owns Fox News.
00:43:40.040Which means, I think Ryan is probably right, that this does level Nikki Haley up a little bit.
00:43:45.980But the unfortunate thing for her is that leveling up from right now, just even in that poll that was cited on CNBC with Paul Ryan in the clip, right now Haley is at 9%.
00:44:57.820In a way, this is a mark in favor of Ron DeSantis, by the way.
00:45:00.920This is something I've always said is one of the best parts of Ron DeSantis, whom I really like.
00:45:06.300The pitch for Ron DeSantis was he's the bigger, better Trump, bigger, better, faster, stronger, more disciplined, more ideologically coherent.
00:45:15.740But that's why the establishment doesn't like him.
00:45:17.540From the beginning, all the optimists, the DeSantis optimists who said he's the best candidate because he's going to pull from Trump and he's going to pull from the establishment.
00:45:26.880I said he's going to pull from neither.
00:45:30.380If you want Trump, you're going to vote for Trump.
00:45:31.760If you want establishment, you're going to vote establishment.
00:45:33.520DeSantis, his best positive is also his weakness in a primary like this.
00:45:40.660So, okay, now they've decided it's going to be Nikki Haley, which means, barring some totally unforeseen event, it's probably going to be Trump.
00:46:04.640George Soros and his son, Alex Soros, who's taking over the George Soros left-wing financing empire,
00:46:10.760they have just maxed out donations to Joe Biden's 2024 reelect.
00:46:16.860Now, maxing out donations is a little bit misleading here because we have all these weird campaign finance rules.
00:46:23.260Maxing out donations means they each gave $6,600, which is nothing.
00:46:27.360That's the amount of money they make every time they blink, okay?
00:46:30.220$6,600 is not going to matter at all to the campaigns.
00:46:33.460Now, they'd also given a quarter million dollars to the Biden Victory Fund, which is much less regulated than the actual candidate campaign committee.
00:46:44.260But the reason that they're doing this is not about the $6,000 or whatever, $1,200, $13,000, and it's not about even the quarter million dollars.
00:46:52.280It's about signaling to the rest of the left that the big dog funders are still with Biden.
00:47:00.260The hardest hit person here is Gavin Newsom, followed by Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, all these other jokers who want to take Biden's spot.
00:47:11.260There's still a ton of support, major institutional support for Biden.
00:47:18.680What's really funny, too, is you see on the left, despite Biden's extremely low approval ratings, all of the left, the elite and even a lot of the grassroots, they're still backing Biden.
00:47:35.240On the right, the entire elite basically hates Donald Trump, even though he's the guy who's running kind of as an incumbent.
00:47:43.560He's leading the pack by 40, 50 points.
00:47:45.740You're still seeing these major establishment elite networks donating a ton of money to other candidates, even candidates who are polling at something like 9%.
00:47:53.420You look at the Koch network and Nikki Haley, shows you just a major difference between the left and the right.
00:47:59.200The left pretty much put together marching in lockstep.
00:48:02.940The right at each other's throats carved up into at least two, maybe three factions.
00:48:10.640But the people, it would appear, will tolerate Joe Biden.
00:48:15.340Joe Biden, even without the superdelegates, even without trying to push Bobby Kennedy out, Joe Biden would still win the nomination.
00:48:21.800There's no question about that for the Democrats.
00:48:25.020They would be, the people on the Democrat side would still basically be in line with the elite and the leaders.
00:48:30.680On the right, the elite and the leaders are totally opposed to the people in terms of which candidate they back.
00:48:40.68050% or more of Republican voters back Donald Trump.
00:48:44.800If you polled Republican elites, I bet something like 60 to 80% of the Republican elites, especially the guys with the money, oppose Trump.