Amazon is ditching its Just Walkout technology for retail stores just six years after launching it. And a 28-year-old woman is bragging to the media that she is going to kill herself in about a month. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:23:28.300They filled all the seats, and they were polite for almost the whole time.
00:23:33.060I'm standing here now, a biological male wearing a dress with a pair of leggings.
00:23:37.200Do you sincerely believe that I should be subject to punitive justice on the basis of what I'm wearing?
00:23:41.720And if so, are you willing to turn yourself in for wearing women's panties in your gay college film?
00:23:45.500I say almost the whole time because a couple students, one who called himself transgender and another who called herself non-binary, became a bit more pointed during the Q&A.
00:23:59.240I was happy to answer their questions.
00:24:01.260So happy, in fact, that we all decided to sit down and have a conversation after the event.
00:24:06.580This series is about finding one or two students who are not only going to scream and shriek and burn me in effigy when I give these speeches,
00:24:15.660but who oppose my views and are willing to sit down and have a discussion face-to-face.
00:24:20.360Watch the full episode now on YouTube.
00:24:21.560If you are planning to come protest my YAF speech at the University of Utah next week and you want to discuss our difference in viewpoints,
00:24:29.200just find producer Mr. Ben Davies and yell at him, simple as.
00:24:34.120So Trump starts out, he uses bloodbath to mean economic turmoil.
00:24:38.020The RNC now launches this website, Biden bloodbath, talking about the migrant crisis.
00:24:43.080Trump then runs with that version of bloodbath.
00:24:47.820I stand before you today to declare the Joe Biden's border bloodbath, and that's what it is.
00:25:43.980But it is amazing that Trump is now using the word bloodbath to mean something closer to how the libs misinterpreted the word than it is to his original meaning of the word.
00:25:56.920That is—and very few people are going to notice this.
00:26:00.200But it is how politics and rhetoric and memes change and move over time.
00:26:08.460A word could mean something three years ago and mean something totally different today.
00:26:14.680And so when we're arguing about it, very often we're just arguing past one another.
00:28:10.120He just kind of, he picked his rhetoric, and it was locked in in about 2011.
00:28:14.940And he didn't adapt to new challenges, new problems that arose, the failures of certain policy prescriptions that his team was pushing for at that time.
00:28:23.760And so he just gets stuck there, and now his rhetoric has no persuasive power.
00:28:29.340This happens to a lot of politicians, even really good politicians.
00:28:47.180But his rhetoric does not have anywhere near the persuasive power that it did 10 years ago, when he was a fairly well-known member of Congress, governor of Indiana.
00:29:03.980You see this especially, forget about immigration and the economy for a second.
00:29:07.760You see this when he's talking about the war in the Middle East, the Israel-Palestine conflict, specifically with regard to a potential invasion of Gaza.
00:30:34.200Because every public opinion poll, every survey right now shows that the American people have turned against the state of Israel in this war.
00:30:41.660They think the war has gone on too long.
00:30:43.740They don't see any likelihood that Israel will achieve its military objectives.
00:30:48.800This is not just true among the radical left or even the fringe right.
00:30:51.860It's just broadly the American people.
00:30:53.920It is simply a fact they do not, no longer do they support the state of Israel in this war.
00:31:45.660And there's a difference between justice in going to war and justice in conducting war.
00:31:49.840And when we're talking about the military objectives, we now have reports out from Israeli intelligence, anonymously and on the record,
00:31:57.060saying that they no longer believe that they will be able to achieve their chief military objective, which is the eradication of Hamas as the governing body in Gaza.
00:32:07.020So this is according to one anonymous intelligence source telling the Telegraph, a month ago I would have definitely said Israel can eliminate Hamas, but not now that the U.S. has turned its back on Israel.
00:32:19.200So you see, contingent on changing circumstances, namely public support in the United States for the Israeli war effort, because the United States funds the Israeli military.
00:32:28.260Contingent on that fact, the Israeli intelligence source has changed his assessment of whether or not the state of Israel can achieve its military goals.
00:32:38.520Then, according to an Israeli political analyst, Mitchell Barak, says Israel's twin aims of destroying Hamas and saving the Israeli hostages, which Mike Pence conflates here, quote, are clashing with each other and both can't happen.
00:32:51.560That is an on-the-record comment from an Israeli political analyst speaking to the Wall Street Journal.
00:32:55.800So you might say, well, but they should be able to defeat Hamas.
00:33:40.380But when it comes to Israel has no option but to invade, of course, any army has a choice to invade or not to invade.
00:33:46.620And in this case, given what we have already established, and it's not just we who have established it.
00:33:52.920It's Israeli intelligence that has apparently established this, according to off and on, anonymous and on-the-record comment to the media.
00:34:03.520According to them, the invasion of Rafa would not be justified because in order to justify actions in war, you need to satisfy criteria of the long-established just war theory,
00:34:20.380which was developed, obviously, by the church in large part by scholastics.
00:34:26.260But there have been plenty of modern, non-Christian philosophers who have contributed to this.
00:34:32.080There are ancient pagan philosophers who have contributed to this.
00:34:34.740This is a universally recognized principle of war.
00:34:38.100And when we're talking about just war theory, in this particular case, we ought to focus specifically on proportionality, whether the violence being used is not excessive vis-a-vis the aims of the war and the reasonable probability of success.
00:34:54.320So in this case, you've got Mike Pence saying one thing, and you've got Israeli intelligence saying a totally different thing.
00:35:00.780Who are you going to believe when it comes to the Israeli military position?
00:35:04.480I really don't mean to beat up on Mike Pence here, and I actually don't even really mean to focus so much on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
00:35:12.120That's really more an example to prove a broader point.
00:35:18.260One needs to adapt one's rhetoric and strategies and entire thought process in politics to changing circumstances.
00:35:28.740Because politics is not just eternal principles.
00:35:31.680There are some really shallow-thinking, whiny, prissy people in politics, who a lot of the squishes often do this, who seem to believe that politics is about eternal principles, and that's that.
00:35:47.960And often their eternal principles are just some slogans from 15 years ago.
00:35:51.740And they're not actually all that eternal, and they don't seem all that principled.
00:35:54.660But in principle, even, that isn't what politics is.
00:35:59.220Politics has to do with certain eternal principles, truths that will stand the test of time, but also changing circumstances.
00:36:08.020This is why so many people who got really comfortable with the rhetoric and circumstances of, I don't know, 2011 or 2008 or 1995 or whatever, why they couldn't understand the rise of Donald Trump.
00:36:25.140Donald Trump rose in the Republican Party because the leaders of the Republican Party were not meeting the moment.
00:36:32.780They were not meeting the challenges of the moment.
00:36:34.460They were not responsive to the Republican voters.
00:36:36.580They weren't even aware that circumstances had changed.
00:36:39.760And if they were, they didn't care because they all had nice, cushy sinecures at Beltway think tanks, and they didn't want their nice lifestyle, their comfort, either material comfort or even intellectual and political comfort,
00:36:57.540That stuff goes stale, and then the persuasive power goes away.
00:37:00.260And then people who are a little more of the moment take that power.
00:37:07.980Now, speaking of radically changing circumstances and the next generation, there is an extremely distressing story coming out of the Netherlands.
00:37:17.940And it's a story that will probably find its way to America soon if it hasn't already.
00:37:24.720I'm talking about people in their 20s who are killing themselves with the approval, with the endorsement of the political authorities and even the medical community because they just kind of feel the sads.
00:37:37.540Not because they have some terminal illness.
00:37:39.640Not because they're in some immense pain that will inevitably lead to their imminent death.
00:37:47.820They just feel kind of sad, and so they're killing themselves, and the political order is permitting, facilitating, and celebrating it.
00:39:33.360And so the virtues don't work together as a coherent whole to lead to our flourishing.
00:39:38.400They just kind of go off, and they all go mad on their own way.
00:39:41.280And then we end up, we think, as a consequence of following our charity, we need to open up our border and let a bunch of gangbangers come in here or something like that.
00:39:51.280Or as a consequence of following our moderation, we need to negotiate with people who want to slaughter little babies, for instance.
00:39:58.000Or as a consequence of our humility, we need to throw up our hands and embrace a radical skepticism to say that we no longer even know what a woman is.
00:40:05.580I mean, there's a kernel of a virtue in there, but because they're all disconnected, they go totally crazy, and we live in an age that is certainly heretical and very, very disordered.
00:40:17.400Turning to the Netherlands, which is even more disordered than America is right now, really, really distressing story.
00:40:24.800It's published here in the Free Press, Barry Weiss's paper.
00:40:28.260Headline, I'm 28, and I'm scheduled to die in May.
00:40:30.960Some right-to-die activists want everyone to have access to euthanasia, which means good death, even though it's ironic because it means the opposite of a good death.
00:40:39.180It's the worst kind of death, which is a suicide.
00:40:41.480Even young people with mental illness, are they making suicide contagious?
00:47:50.460And then that just becomes part of our identity, among the most important parts of our identity.
00:47:58.000And so if our culture becomes totally selfish and says, do whatever you want, forget about it, and ignores specifically the moral virtues, then a lot more people are going to kill themselves, depressed 28-year-olds, and even kids watching a TV show.
00:48:13.200Okay, before we go, Hillary Clinton is, she's doing her best to campaign for the Democrats.
00:48:22.760But it's very hard because Joe Biden is a terrible president who is personally very embarrassing and who hasn't achieved anything.
00:48:50.680Right, and, you know, it's kind of like one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart, and really cares about people, and one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies.
00:49:12.040Okay, first of all, the fact that a former president, current leader of the opposition, is being charged with any felonies,
00:49:17.720the higher the number, actually, the more I think it proves my point.
00:49:22.900The fact that that is happening to a former president, current leader of the opposition, is evidence to most Americans, according to surveys, that he is being persecuted for his political views.
00:49:36.600If it were one felony, maybe you could say, well, it may be committed a crime.
00:49:40.980The fact that it's 91 only reinforces that belief that it's just a political persecution.
00:50:10.860The people don't like us, and we're not doing well in the polls, and especially the young people really don't like what we're doing.
00:50:16.100Is it possible that we, the Democrat Party, the progressive party, where the median age of its leaders is about 152, where we haven't changed our rhetoric in quite some time?
00:50:27.240And inasmuch as we have changed our rhetoric, it's to adopt views that are completely absurd and repugnant to most of the American people.
00:50:35.420The notion that a big man should go into a little girl's bathroom, for instance.
00:50:38.420Is it possible that we're out of touch?